scholarship

currently, i work full-time in the disinformation action lab at data & society, where i help civic institutions become more resilient to disinformation campaigns.

i’m also a doctoral candidate at the university of north carolina in the department of communication. my long term research interest is in understanding how cultural industries are shaping – and being shaped by – what many are calling platform capitalism. (a term i don’t especially like, but is part of the discourse for better and worse).

to that end, my dissertation examines the formation of the esports industry through the lens of platformization. since mid- 2019, i’ve been interviewing stakeholders from across the esports industry and conducting participant observation at events across the world. this project considers the platformization of professional gaming as a “technological drama,” examining the sociotechnical imaginaries that drive the esports industry, as well as how and why they often break down in practice.

i’ve received competitive grants from unc, twitch, and the department of education and, in 2020, i received an early career researcher award from the surveillance studies network.

my most current cv may always be found here.

publications:

here’s something i published in the journal surveillance and society about platform surveillance, political economy, and the labor of livestreaming, as well as my article on “platform capture” – a technique by which platforms evolve via recreating first party versions of third-party services – in social media + society.

i enjoy collaborative work and frequently write with friends from across multiple disciplines. here’s one such piece in american behavioral scientist i wrote with alice marwick and rebecca lewis about networked harassment on youtube; some other collaborations are forthcoming with maxwell foxman and brandon harris, as well as danah boyd.

at data & society, i’m part of three forthcoming reports: one on how civil rights groups influenced the production of census data in 2020; one on coordinating networked responses to communication threats; and a critique of the epistemologies of disinformation research. all will be released in 2021.

i’ve written two whitepapers, one on competitive minecraft and the other on high school esports, for microsoft.

finally, i’m also editing, along with iris bull, a special issue of romchip: a journal of game histories about esports. it’ll be ready in mid-2021.

presentations:

i go to lots of conferences because i like meeting new people and adapting my research to different disciplines. lately, i’ve been to: nca, ica, aoir, 4s, digra, fdg, and some esports-specific conferences.

prior to covid-19, i was going to slated to speak at sxswedu (march 2020), sxsw (march 2020), scms (april 2020), media industries (april 2020), ica (may 2020), and digra (june 2020). my next in-person conference will like by 4s in toronto.

teaching:

at unc, i teach courses about media and technology, organizational communication, and public speaking. here’s a syllabus i made for our intro to media studies class. i’ll change some things if i teach it again, but it went pretty well.