See my publications list for insight on the full body of my  work.

I completed my PhD in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, with a minor in Science and Technology Studies.  Here are three themes of my PhD research.

Discourse and Social Change.     I am interested in issues of power as they can be understood through a lens of discourse. I consider cases where discourse transforms into actions that feed processes of social change.

My dissertation examined the underrepresentation of women in computing using critical discourse analysis as method: Culture Not Numbers: Dilemmas and Discourse in the Underrepresentation of Women in Computing.

• Payette, S. D., Culture Not Numbers: Dilemmas and Discourses of the Underrepresentation of Women in Computing, 2018, available at ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global (#2108516183) and online in open access at https://doi.org/10.7298/X4VD6WP5

Gender and Computing.    The study of the history of computing reveals a rich history of women in programming.   Peaking in the 1980s, women’s participation has declined since then (both in academic degrees and in practice.

This pieces considers the discourse of two competing paradigms of programming in the 1960s.

• Payette, S., “Hopper and Dijkstra: Crisis, Revolution, and the Future of Programming,”  IEEE Annals of the History of Computing,  vol. 36, no. 4, October-December 2014, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6982140/

Knowledge Infrastructure, Policy and Privacy.   I consider issues from the perspective of knowledge infrastructure, especially Web platforms for data access and collaboration, and mobile applications that support ubiquitous access.

This piece considers privacy and the social and technical complexities of how policy and technical design interact

• Policy Knot Jackson, S.J., Gillespie, T., Payette, S., “The Policy Knot: Re-integrating Policy, Practice, and Design in CSCW Studies of Social Computing,” Proceedings of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Baltimore, MA, February 2014, nominated for best paper (top 5%), http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2531674.