Research
The work behind the work.
Threshold Design is grounded in ongoing scholarship across media psychology, narrative, memory science, and aging. This is where that work lives.
How the Research Works
Empirical and narrative.
Always both.
My research sits where media psychology, gerontology, narrative inquiry, and experience design meet. I use both quantitative and qualitative methods because the questions I care about require both.
Every project begins from the same conviction that drives the practice: that the conditions under which people feel seen, known, and present can be understood. And therefore designed.
Memory, narrative, and identity across the lifespan
How people maintain a continuous sense of self through change, and what happens when the conditions supporting that continuity are absent or poorly designed.
Media, parasocial relationships, and self-concept
How relationships with media figures, characters, and hosts shape identity, belonging, and mental health in underrepresented communities.
The psychology of aging, legacy, and meaning-making
How people make sense of a life as it changes, what they want to leave behind, and how narrative tools support that process.
Immersive experience and emotional design in care contexts
How designed experiences — sensory, narrative, relational — shape the felt quality of care and hold a person's full presence.
Active Inquiries
Three questions the work is currently asking.
In Development · IRB Pending
Transmedia Worldbuilding in Care Environments
How do multiple pathways into a narrative world: sensory, spatial, relational, object-based, create conditions for presence and belonging in care settings?
A genuinely underexplored intersection of media psychology, experience design, and healthcare. Most transmedia research lives in entertainment contexts. This asks what happens when you bring those frameworks into a memory care unit.
Ongoing Lived Research
Inheritance of Meaning
When an object moves from one person to another, what travels with it? Is meaning inherited or remade?
Drawing on object relations theory, reminiscence practice, and ongoing lived fieldwork. Implications for legacy practice, memory care design, and how families hold someone's story through change.
Ongoing · Expanding
Threshold Voices
Story collection from people aging in nursing homes, hospice, and prisons — navigating significant life transitions inside institutional systems not designed for their full presence.
Currently in active collection in care settings, with planned expansion into hospice and prison environments. What does it mean to age inside a system built for something other than you?
Publications & Projects
The body of work.
Scholarship, speaking, and writing across twenty years of the same questions.
McFarland · Rethinking True Crime
Eudamonic Wellness of True Crime Hosts
A co-authored examination of what sustained engagement with true crime content does to the hosts who produce it, and what it reveals about parasocial connection and identity.
Dissertation · Fielding Graduate University · Media Psychology
Exploring the Role of Need for Cognition on Podcast Companion Engagement
An investigation into how cognitive engagement shapes the parasocial bonds audiences form with podcast hosts, and what that reveals about identity, narrative, and media connection across the lifespan.
Read the dissertation →Routledge · Fandom in Marginalized Communities · Co-authored with Tieranni Parquet
The Power of Parasocial Relationships: Fandoms and Black Men's Mental Health through HBO's Insecure
How parasocial relationships with fictional characters support identity, belonging, and mental health in communities that have historically been underrepresented in media.
View book →TEDx · TEDxCheyenne
The Damage of "Difficult"
How the words we use about people shape their sense of who they are. People are never the problem. Problems are problems. People are people.
Watch the talk →Self-published
Karmic Acts of Kindness
A collection exploring small gestures and their ripple effects — an early iteration of the attention to ordinary moments that runs through all the work.
Wyatt-MacKenzie · Award Winner, IBPA
Mommyhood Diaries: Living the Chaos One Day at a Time
An early intuition about the importance of capturing the small moments of ordinary life, written two decades before the research caught up with the instinct. The same belief that drives the reminiscence work today, in its first form.
The Work
This research informs everything
SenStoria builds.
And it is ongoing.
Reading