I am a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University, working with Prof. Andrés Monroy-Hernández in the Princeton HCI group. In my role, I'm also a 2024-2025 Siegel Research Fellow.
My research asks how everyday people can and should shape the governance of technologies pervading our social, economic, and political lives. I primarily focus on the community as a valuable mode of organizing that can enable people to set rules, norms, and tools that help them anticipate + respond to the opportunities and risks of technologies they are users of. In doing so, people can collectively defer to, transform, and subvert the design and policy imperatives encoded in them - sometimes bringing good, sometimes producing harm. I center my work around community-based models of governance because I think they raise hopeful and challenging questions of accountability, autonomy, and scale. Answers to these questions orient how we might think about power, participation, institutions, and "good" design around complex ecologies in sociotechnical systems.
I have studied online communities on centralized platforms like Reddit and Discord; open source and peer production communities; and decentralized platforms. My current work is focused on governance in community and cooperatively-owned technologies, like decentralized social media or worker cooperatives.
I move between empirical work, theory, and design to understand cooperation + collective action, unintended consequences, and costs. My work is interdisciplinary. I am influenced by political science + government studies, sociology, human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, critical computing + data studies, and feminist theory. I often refer to institutional theory in the traditions of new institutionalism.
As a PhD student, I was advised by Prof. Aaron Shaw + part of the Community Data Science Collective (CDSC) in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University. My studies were generously supported by the NSF GRFP. I am still affiliated with CDSC and occasionally crash meetings :)
You can scroll down to see some select publications, past talks, etc. The archives page has more information.