Spring 2024 — I am teaching discussion sections of COMM 2010 (Oral Communication) this semester. And after five years here at Cornell, I will be graduating at the end of the semester! Here’s a look at some of my ongoing research projects this spring:

I am defending my dissertation, The New(s) Creators: Labor, Precarity, and Community on Global Subscription Platforms, at the end of this semester. My project examines how the structures, logics, and incentives of the social media economy are reconfiguring the work of independent digital journalism, especially for voices left out of the journalistic mainstream. Based on in-depth interviews with 30 freelance journalists spanning 9 countries, I argue that digital news work on subscription platforms combines the relational and identity work expected of social media creators with the profession-centric boundary work of journalism. The resulting communities formed through subscription paywalls reimagine the possibilities for identity in journalism, while these same platforms’ governance practices raise legitimate concerns about editorial integrity in a news environment already flooded with disinformation. This project also analyzes the political economy of subscription news by considering how subscription platforms sidestep debates about the appeasement of advertiser interests and unequal experiences with social media algorithms. These urgent challenges provide a landscape for bringing together essential questions in my research agenda and help to develop an updated understanding of the “influence” of influencer culture far beyond social media creators.

I am also working on a project with my colleague Bya Rodrigues about the use of “identity tags” on live streaming and digital patronage platforms. In recent years, many platforms have expanded options for “identity tags” (see, for example, on Twitch) to help people find community with similar-identifying others based on their gender and sexuality identity, race, nationality, ability, and other characteristics. Although this was initially appraised as a victory for representation in platform cultures, these tags have also offered blueprints for making already marginalized users even more vulnerable to online harassment. Bya and I are interested in this tension between visibility and vulnerability, and our project aims to examine how marginalized users make sense of—be it rejecting or incorporating—these identity options on social media. We hope to present an initial version of this study at a conference later this year.

Finally, I’ll be presenting two papers at the Media Industries 2024 conference at King’s College London in April. The papers are “Fragmented solidarities in the social media industries: Labor politics, creator-platform relations, and the case of harassment campaigns” on a panel focused on collective action among social media creators and “Beyond algorithmic visibility” on a roundtable discussion focused on the perils of visibility for workers across diverse categories of the cultural industries. If you plan to be there, please reach out if you’d like to have a coffee chat or say hello.