Morgan Lundy

What's My Research?

As a doctoral candidate at UIUC, I partner with and research the information creation practices of disabled folks on social media, through critical disability studies-informed content analysis, interviews and visualization activities, and accessible participatory methods like hybrid co-design. I am interested in creative, affective, embodied and collective information behavior. In my doctoral research, I am working with TikTok communit(ies) of folks with unexplained chronic pain and fatigue-defined disabilities (e.g., fibromyalgia, POTS, chronic fatigue syndrome), where there is a strong need for disabled expertise-- both social knowledge to deal with stigma, and day-to-day symptom management expertise. I seek to define what I call algorithmically-mediated online health communities (AMOHCs) on TikTok, with messy overlapping boundaries, and opportunities for cross-disability sharing and support. Up next, we will facilitate co-design workshops with 20 community members to continue to distill abilities and needs,
and create a materially useful disability storytelling support materials "toolkit."