I study the collective and communicative practices on social media and how these acts uphold or challenge the dominant narratives, power hierarchies, and hegemonic ideologies, with a specific concentration on race and ethnicity. I have an interdisciplinary and epistemologically pluralist research agenda that utilizes across both critical and computational approaches.
My research tries to disturb a universalist understanding of scientific objectivity that demands that researchers be distant and detached for analytical neutrality. Instead, I believe my own minority identities are not obstacles to “objectivity” that should be bracketed, but an enriched aperture through which I gain thick descriptions and deep knowledge to decode who we are in the digital world we live in. My focus on everyday people’s communication and information sharing is also guided by an epistemic justice that foregrounds people's lived experiences.
Current Research Agenda
My eclectic research projects converge on the theme of identity volatility, the idea that who we are is often in constant flux in digitally mediated environments. Departing from research that treats identity as a stable attribute to be collected and analyzed, my work examines the dynamics of dentity changeand how these changes shape distinct communication dynamics. Specicially, there are three research strands that I am actively working on:
How do technologies make identities negotiable?
How do users perform digital identities with deliberation?
How does identity emerge from interrelatedness?