Many dominant approaches to youth online safety are built around assumptions about what constitutes risk, what young people need protection from, and what resources are available to help them stay safe. These assumptions may not fully reflect how safety is understood and practiced across different sociocultural contexts.

In this ongoing interview study, I work directly with Nigerian youth to understand how they conceptualize online safety, the experiences they consider safe or unsafe, and the strategies they use to navigate digital spaces. The project also examines how factors such as family, peers, technology access, and local sociocultural expectations shape young people's understandings and practices around online safety.

This research contributes toward developing more culturally grounded approaches to youth online safety that begin with young people's lived experiences rather than assuming that existing definitions of safety apply uniformly across contexts.

This project examined the online experiences of 409 secondary school adolescents in Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory. We investigated how young people access digital technologies, the online risks they encounter, the strategies they use to respond to those risks, and the people they turn to for support.

The study also examined adolescents' own recommendations for improving online safety. Rather than considering risk in isolation, the project connected young people's safety practices to their access to technology, available support systems, and confidence in the strategies available to them.

Outcome: Published at AfriCHI 2025 and received the Best Paper Award.

This project investigated the experiences of youth who self-identified as Children in Need of Services (CHINS), including youth connected to the child welfare and juvenile justice systems and youth with incarcerated parents.

We analyzed young people's conversations on an online peer-support platform to understand how they discussed adverse experiences in their offline and online lives. The project examined both sides of young people's internet use: online spaces could provide opportunities for connection and support while also introducing or intensifying risks in their lives.

Outcome: Published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (2025).

I served as a mentor in a South Bend community fellowship that engaged justice-involved youth in exploring youth violence and ways to strengthen their communities. Through conversations and mentoring sessions, we worked with youth to reflect on their experiences, concerns, and aspirations for their neighborhoods.

As part of the fellowship, we also facilitated participatory design activities using zine-making as a creative form of self-expression. Youth used the zines to communicate their experiences and perspectives and to envision changes they wanted to see in their communities. The project provided a space for youth to move beyond being recipients of community interventions and instead express their own ideas about the issues affecting them and their neighborhoods.

This community-engaged project involved a co-design workshop with K–8 students at St. Adalbert School as part of a broader restoration initiative. Through hands-on storytelling and design activities, students reflected on their experiences and created their own narratives about the spaces, histories, and stories that were meaningful to them.

The workshop explored how these youth-created stories could inform the design of digital archives for preserving and sharing community history. Rather than determining in advance what stories should be preserved or how they should be represented, the co-design process centered young people as storytellers whose perspectives could shape both the content and design of future digital archives.

More broadly, the project examines how participatory design can connect youth storytelling, community history, and digital preservation, creating opportunities for young people to contribute to how the histories of their communities are documented and remembered.

Youth in the child welfare system often rely on a network of adults—including family members, caseworkers, and advocates—to support their safety and wellbeing. Yet many online safety technologies assume that parents are the primary people responsible for managing young people's digital experiences.

In this project, we conducted a two-part participatory design workshop with 10 Guardians ad Litem, court-appointed advocates for youth in the child welfare system. We explored the challenges GALs encounter when supporting young people's online safety and collaboratively envisioned technology-based solutions responsive to the realities of the child welfare ecosystem.

Outcome: Published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (2026).

In this mentorship program, I worked with young people with disabilities to introduce foundational programming concepts and strengthen their understanding of computational logic. The program emphasized learning through accessible, hands-on activities rather than treating programming as simply learning syntax.

Beyond technical instruction, the experience focused on creating a supportive environment in which students could explore computing, ask questions, work through problems, and build confidence in their ability to engage with technology.

AI ethics frameworks frequently invoke principles such as fairness, privacy, transparency, explainability, and bias as though these concepts have stable meanings across contexts. Yet ethical values can be interpreted differently depending on cultural norms, histories, institutions, and local experiences with technology.

In this interview study, we engage AI researchers, practitioners, and other experts from multiple cultural contexts to examine how they understand and define AI ethics from their own cultural standpoints. The study explores how participants interpret key ethical values, how they understand the risks and opportunities associated with AI in their contexts, and what they believe culturally grounded AI governance should look like.

The broader goal is to understand what happens when seemingly universal AI ethics principles travel across contexts and how AI design and governance can better recognize plural forms of knowledge, values, and lived experience.

Outcome: Published at AIES 2026

Generative AI is introducing new opportunities for young people while also complicating existing questions about privacy, harmful content, misinformation, interaction with AI systems, and responsibility for keeping youth safe.

In this interview study, I engaged stakeholders who work with or around young people to understand how they envision youth safety in the age of Generative AI. The study examines the risks and opportunities stakeholders associate with these technologies, how they currently manage safety concerns, and where they believe existing approaches fall short.

The project aims to identify how responsibility for youth AI safety is distributed across young people, families, educators, technology companies, policymakers, and other stakeholders—and what more collaborative approaches to safety might look like.