Jasmina Tacheva is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Studies. She studied Philosophy, Economics and German at Canisius College and earned her Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo’s (UB) School of Management, where she was part of the NAVIGATE Project, an NSF-sponsored initiative for supporting women in STEM. During her time at UB, she co-organized of the Annual Social Sciences and Humanities Symposium and won the 2018 UB World’s Challenge Challenge with ElevateHer—a data science education project for women in developing countries in collaboration with software engineer Manjusha Raveendran and structural engineer and founder of Women Engineers Pakistan Ramla Qureshi. Her research on the social networks of digital volunteers on Twitter won the best poster award at this year’s Northeast Regional Conference on Complex Systems.
Research
My research examines the mechanisms through which user-generated content shapes human behavior, with a focus on social justice, digital volunteerism, and sustainability. At the macro level, I am interested in the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) for enhancing vital services and organizations such as healthcare systems and humanitarian logistics and operations. At the individual level, I study how social media interactions inform the ways we think and communicate about social justice issues such as climate change, racial equality, healthcare, and LGBTQ+ Rights. Being aware of, and taking a stand against, interlocking systems of injustice and oppression is conceptualized by critical theorists Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Tanya Loughead as the process of developing critical consciousness, and the central goal of my research is to examine the role social media, understood as an extension of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the public realm, plays in critical consciousness development.
My work also hopes to problematize the development and use of computational methods, especially artificial intelligence (AI), from a humanistic perspective, and center the need for critical consciousness in the field. To this end, I use a combination of humanistic theoretical perspectives, including feminist and queer critical analysis and critical data studies, and social network and machine learning methods.
Personal
A dog person stuck with two cats, Jasmina dabbles in micro poetry, long-exposure photography, and Jackson guitars. She does love her cats, despite their lack of affection for her.
