Liu, P. (CM) – Reimagining Workplace Concern Reporting: From Emotional Harm to Co-Designed Futures

Workplace concern reporting infrastructure, including human resources (HR) portals, grievance procedures, and whistleblower hotlines, is the formal channel through which employees in most organizations raise concerns about harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. Yet existing research consistently finds that these systems fail the employees they are meant to protect: reports stall, concerns get filtered, retaliation occurs, and marginalized employees face disproportionate risk. This dissertation examines workplace concern reporting as relational, emotional, and processual rather than procedural and discrete, and pursues this account through three studies. Study 1, drawing on semi-structured interviews with 12 HR professionals and 10 employees in California, develops the concept of emotional re-victimization to describe how reporting infrastructure produces additional harm at multiple stages of the reporting process. Study 2 returns to the same corpus with a different theoretical lens to develop the concept of buffer spaces: intermediary practices through which employees navigate the gap between informal sense-making and formal escalation. Study 3 will move the dissertation from diagnostic to practical work in two phases. Phase 1 uses speculative co-design with employees and HR professionals to surface what each group would build if they could redesign concern reporting infrastructure together. Phase 2 translates design directions from Phase 1 into prototypes, iterated with participants across both groups to develop design artifacts that have been shaped by the people who would use them. The dissertation as a whole moves from documenting harm, through identifying workarounds, to imagining redesign, contributing to HCI/CSCW scholarship on workplace technology, labor studies on employee voice and accountability, and methodological work on cross-stakeholder speculative design.

Event Host: Peiyao Liu, Ph.D. Student, Computational Media

Advisor: Norman Makoto Su

Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/99335305923?pwd=xP6QlNwzobLNQqnCxG3muuZD36C4rn.1

Passcode: 946352