Title: The Mechanisms of Muting: Deconstructing the Technology-Mediated Violence of Silence

Jasmine C. Foriest, MPH, MS
PhD Candidate in Human-Centered Computing
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
www.jcforiest.com

Date: Wednesday, March 18th, 2026
Location: TSRB 217A
Zoom: Foriest Proposal Zoom Link
Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM EST

Committee:
Dr. Amy S. Bruckman (Advisor/Chair)
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Andrea G. Parker
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Beki Grinter
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Tiffany C. Veinot
School of Information and School of Public Health
University of Michigan

Dr. Nicki Dell
College of Computing and Information Science
Cornell Tech

Abstract:
Digital technologies indisputably mediate and amplify real-world social outcomes, including violence, in novel ways. Yet HCI remains constrained in its approaches to characterizing and remediating these outcomes, owing in part to their latent, structural, and embedded nature within both society and technology. One such hidden harm that precedes violent outcomes is muting — the systematic silencing of non-dominant groups from venues of discourse where identity, reality, and social change are constructed. Drawing on Muted Group Theory, this dissertation demonstrates that digital muting constitutes a form of technology-mediated violence that obstructs help-seeking behavior and access to the epistemic resources essential for violence prevention.

This dissertation deconstructs three mechanisms through which digital artifacts mediate muting as violence: removal, replication, and reconstruction. First, the removal of information in mass media's digital representation of suicide creates informational barriers that obstruct help-seeking for at-risk populations. Second, the replication of silencing social dynamics in online community design enables the systematic suppression of gender-based violence survivors. Third, the reconstruction of prejudice and partial knowledge in large language models perpetuates epistemic injustice for survivors of intimate partner violence. Taken together, these studies reveal how digital artifacts both constrain and enable support for those experiencing violence — and surface a recursive tension in which the very interventions designed to address muting often become mechanisms of it. This dissertation names this fourth mechanism remediation: the process by which responses to harm can reproduce or extend the silencing they sought to interrupt.

This dissertation concludes with a reorientation of HCI's research practices through what it terms the Heuristics of Harm — the disciplinary pathways, conceptual conventions, and methodological habits that have structured what the field has been able to see, study, and respond to with regard to digital harm. Across three interrelated domains — the language of harm, the methods used to measure it, and the assumptions about what or who can perpetrate it — this dissertation traces how existing conventions have produced unexamined areas that render technology-mediated violence invisible before it can be addressed.