Research Statement

As a scholar, I am interested in intersectional approaches to digital rhetorics and the ways I can link this inquiry to students’ everyday learning. My research theorizes productive overlaps between algorithmic rhetorics and ecological ethos as a means to critically attend to the ways technologies shape our rhetorical actions including how we make connections with other people. In understanding the rhetorical affordances and constraints of algorithmic technologies, I argue we can imagine trajectories that address existing inequalities instead of perpetuating them. Interdisciplinary in nature, my work demonstrates possibilities for digital rhetoric research and practice when we revisit and re-imagine rhetorical concepts like ethos.

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Dissertation Abstract

My dissertation, Algorithmic Dwelling: The Consequences of Ethos on Social Media Platforms, addresses recent trends in social media content recommendations that have led to increased political polarization in the United States and the proliferation of radicalizing conspiracy theories such as Qanon and #StoptheSteal. In analyzing algorithmic infrastructures, I explore how the technocapitalist priorities designed into social media platforms amplify more extreme content. Ethos’s long-standing concern with trust, credibility, and expertise makes it uniquely suited to address how these platforms have weakened our democratic institutions. Drawing from algorithmic rhetorics, posthumanism, critical theory, decolonial theory, queer phenomenology, and indigenous materialism, I forward rhetorical tethering, an ecological conception of ethos that accounts for the intersectional connections between people, technologies, infrastructures, and spaces. While the first part examines numerous social media platforms including Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, the second part consists of a case study that utilizes algorithmic mapping, a digital method I developed for collecting and rhetorically analyzing data from YouTube’s content recommendation system. Through their algorithmic outputs, these social media platforms carry traces of their designers’ assumptions and biases that influence the rhetorical practices afforded to users. This dissertation offers both theories and methods for addressing the (sometimes dangerous) consequences of algorithmic systems that blur the boundaries between online and offline spaces.

Selected Publications

Medical device manufacturers and other high-technology companies increasingly incorporate algorithmic data surveillance in next-generation medical wearables. These devices, including hearing aids, leverage patient data created through human-computer interaction to not only power devices but also increase corporate profits. Although data protection laws establish privacy requirements for personal information collection and use, these companies continue to use patients’ personal information with little notice or education, significantly curtailing the agency of wearers. We explore the complex ecology of the Starkey Halo smart hearing aid, focusing on the opacity of its algorithmic functionality and examining patient education materials for disclosures of data surveillance. We contextualize these findings within privacy doctrines in the United States and European Union that are relevant to algorithmic surveillance and recommend specific steps to enhance wearer agency through informed decision-making

“Algorithmic Dwelling: Ethos as Deformance in Online Spaces.” Rhetoric Review. 39.2 (May 2020). 216-229

Considering recent returns to pre-Aristotelian understandings of ethos as the creation of dwelling spaces, this article argues that dwelling in algorithmically mediated spaces such as Facebook is intrinsically connected to ethos. The 2016 Dueling Protests in Houston, Texas serve as a case study of how Facebook’s platform functioned as a crucial tool for the Russian Internet Agency’s (IRA) disinformation campaigns. Examining interactions in these ethe ecologies reveals how algorithms shape community perceptions and constructions of ethos.

“The Banality of Digital Aggression: Algorithmic Data Surveillance in Medical Wearables.” with Krista Kennedy. Digital Ethics. 2019.

Using the Starkey Halo smart hearing aid as a case study, this chapter investigates surveillance as both necessity and aggression in essential medical wearables. Wearers of smart hearing aids interact daily with multiple algorithms that automatically adjust sound based on detection of ambient noise, Bluetooth-based media streaming, and satellite-based geolocation settings. Resulting data is collected by Starkey and Apple for product development purposes. This network poses complications for the wearer’s performance of rhetorical agency by aggressively imposing surveillance through banal data collection. By relying on rhetorical concepts of banality and expediency alongside aspects of New Surveillance theory, our study interprets autoethnographic data, systematic analysis of the Halo network, and close textual analysis of Starkey promotional materials as well as relevant Terms of Use agreements. It concludes with near-future projections for these devices as full health metrics monitors and provides recommendations for best practices in data collection policies for medical wearables.