UMSI assistant professor Michaelanne Thomas earns 2025 Lasting Impact Award from CSCW

University of Michigan School of Information assistant professor Michaelanne Thomas is the recipient of the 2025 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) Lasting Impact Award. The award honors papers published at least 10 years ago that have significantly shaped the CSCW research community.

Thomas’ paper, “Hollaback!: the role of storytelling online in a social movement organization” examined how the anti-harassment platform Hollaback! leveraged online storytelling as a tool for collective action against street harassment. 

Led by Jill P. Dimond and co-authored by Daphne Larose, and Amy Bruckman, the study was published in 2013 and investigated how individual stories of harassment, shared through a simple web interface and app, contributed to a growing global movement to make public spaces safer for women and marginalized communities.

“We wanted to understand what happens when people share personal stories online,” Thomas says. “Not just the social dynamics, but the personal impact. What does it mean for someone to tell their story, and how does that story contribute to collective awareness and change?”

The research found that Hollaback! participants were not using the site to “track crimes” but rather to validate shared experiences, foster empathy and build a sense of solidarity. The paper demonstrated how storytelling, particularly when centered on marginalized voices, could serve as a powerful form of activism, creating collective visibility and social change through networked technologies.

Another key contribution of the paper was its methodological stance: it was one of the early papers that feminist reflexivity and researcher self-disclosure to CSCW, encouraging scholars to situate themselves politically and ethically in their work. This approach, common in feminist research traditions, challenged prevailing notions of neutrality in computing research and helped open space for more values-driven, participatory design practices.

“The paper aligned itself with the movements it studied,” Thomas says. “We acknowledged our politics and the fact that technology is never neutral, and that has shaped how I’ve approached every project since.”

Over a decade later, “Hollaback!: the role of storytelling online in a social movement organization” remains a foundational text in human-computer interaction, social computing, and digital activism, cited for its lasting influence on how researchers think about narrative, voice and technology’s role in social change.

About CSCW

CSCW is a premier venue for presenting research in the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, and communities. The conference brings together top researchers and practitioners from academia and industry who are interested in both the technical and social aspects of collaboration.

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Read “Hollaback!: the role of storytelling online in a social movement organization” on the ACM Digital Library. 

Learn more about assistant professor Michaelanne Thomas by visiting her UMSI faculty profile. 

Check out UMSI papers, workshops, and awards at CSCW 2025 in our research roundup and subscribe for free today.