Dissertation

In my dissertation, which I successfully defended in May of 2025, I spoke with people who use prosthetic limbs about their experiences adopting and adapting to prostheses across the course of their lives. I did this by bringing together photo-elicitation, turning points analysis, and semi-structured interviews to establish visual timelines of my participants' prostheses over the years and learn about their "cyborg narratives," the stories of their lives as influenced by an ongoing relationship with intimate technologies. In this way, we discussed assistive technologies as communicative objects whose features are both material and social in nature and explored how presumed advancements in prosthesis designs relate to the lived experiences of prostheses-users over the years. This project earned funding from multiple sources, including UIC's competitive Award for Graduate Research.