Peyina Lin

Summer 2013 Fellow

Peyina Lin is a PhD Candidate at the University of Washington Information School (degree expected June 2013). Her research is driven by a commitment to further our understandings about the socio-technical barriers that prevent equitable participation in learning, civic, and media contexts. She aims to find ways to diminish such inequalities via media-rich environments. For example, in her dissertation, she examines how opportunities for extracurricular participation are perceived by students; which social types (e.g.,  Jocks and Nerds) are perceived to have central leadership opportunities; whether such perceptions shape students’ self-imposed norms on activity choices; and how the organization of social types based on friendship and mediated interaction patterns helps envision resource redistribution and strategies to increase youths’ leadership and civic extracurricular opportunities. She finds that there are possibly optimal social structures for teens’ social development. This work won a UW Graduate School Presidential Dissertation Award (2012) and a NSF Sociology Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (2009).

Lin has worked at Microsoft Research (research intern), the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab, Intel Research’s former People and Practices Research Lab, and Dean Emeritus Mike Eisenberg’s projects on information literacy. Through these, she has acted as a researcher, grant writer, project manager, mentor, and instructor on research methods. She employs diverse methods including interpretive inquiry, critical inquiry, video ethnographies, social network analysis, and mixed methods research. Her former degrees are in Digital Media Arts & Technology (MA), Information Management (MS), and International Business (BA). You may find more information about her research on her website.