Publications

New Media & Society

Online knowledge production in polarized political memes: The case of critical race theory (2024)

International Journal of Communication

"These parents, themselves, are using these children as pawns": The politicization of childhood at the U.S.-Mexico Border (2024)

image credit: John Moore, 2018

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Dissertation

Child, nation, and emotion: Analyzing children as rhetorical tools in political campaigns (2024)

image credit: Sarah Mueller, 2022

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The Routledge International Handbook of Children, Adolescents, and Media

Children and advertising policies in the U.S. and beyond (2022)

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Medium

Left to their own devices: How college students manage remote learning during the COVID19 pandemic & how faculty can improve it (2021)

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Works In Progress

From local tragedy to national news: Twitter, anti-immigrant discourse, and the weaponization of public grief online Abstract: As news transmission has moved to social media platforms, user comments and framing of current events represent a wider ranging field of opinion than in the past, abetted by a lack of traditional gatekeeping. This article employs discursive and content analyses to analyze Twitter posts related to news of the 2018 murder of white US teenager Mollie Tibbetts by an undocumented Latino immigrant, illustrating how the news narrative of her death was usurped by Donald Trump and the right-wing Twittersphere and redeployed in the service of anti-immigrant narratives that the Tibbets family did not support. Given the unique mechanisms of social media which both provide and coerce space for public expressions of personal and political mourning, the grieving Tibbets family was thus forced to publicly combat the politicization of this tragedy—a phenomenon increasingly present in our media landscapes. We argue that social media not only allow the weaponization of tragic news but commit an additional kind of violence against grieving families by interrupting their grief and forcing them to reclaim a news narrative.

Should the powerful be moderated? Social media users' perspectives on moderating politicians' inappropriate speech Abstract: This study investigates users’ orientations towards politicians' inappropriate speech online, and how they choose to attempt moderation of this speech. It contributes not only to the policy discussions on how to regulate–or not–politicians’ speech online, but also to general discussions of platform regulation of the powerful and its discontents from users’ perspectives--the very citizens who are represented by these politicians, and have a democratic right to hold them to account. Through focus groups, participants will be asked to reflect on their practices around online speech they deem inappropriate from politicians.

Offline racism and online harm: Investigating racially insensitive social media users' framings of content moderation Abstract: This study uses Pew's 2020 American Trends Survey Panel data to investigate correlations between respondents' offline racial attitudes and their opinions on content moderation online. Putting this data in conversation with the context of the survey's moment--immediately post-BLM marches of Summer 2020--we discuss implications.

Studying the current state of user-enacted moderation features on social media through the experience of users with visual impairments Abstract: This study interviews blind and low-vision social media users to assess the accessibility of different types of content moderation tools on Facebook and X, including reporting, blocking, and muting.