about me

I am a PRODIG+ Fellow in Critical AI, with my tenure home in the Department of Journalism. My research sits at the intersection of knowledge, technology, and culture, examining the politics of culture with particular attention to how technologies mediate and reconfigure cultural dynamics. My work has been published in journals such as American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, and Sociological Forum. Much of my research is comparative, either through cross-national comparisons or through a comparative lens applied to a single research site. Methodologically, I employ a diverse toolkit that includes ethnography, interviews, computational text analysis, network analysis, national surveys, and online experiments.

My current research develops along two main lines. The first investigates how artificial intelligence reshapes communication and sociopolitical life, both at the micro level of human–AI interactions and in broader patterns of human–human relations mediated by AI systems. Within this domain, I examine how individuals’ social positionalities shape their engagement with AI technologies, including preferences toward AI and perceptions of the legitimacy of government decisions mediated by algorithms, particularly in authoritarian contexts. I also study how the diffusion of AI expertise can reinforce or challenge existing inequalities, focusing on uneven AI governance across higher education institutions and disparities in the adoption of AI technologies across populations.

The second line of my research examines journalism as a key site for shaping public understandings of the social world. In this work, I study how fact-checkers identify misinformation and how this process is conditioned by the mediating technologies they employ.

More broadly, my research explores the sociopolitical forces that drive shifts in culture and communication. My prior work has examined how expert labor contributes to the legitimacy of institutional practices, such as legal compliance and vaccine uptake—an inquiry that culminated in my article “Work of Legitimacy,” published in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. I have also studied the social forces underlying cultural phenomena, including how past disease encounters and sociopolitical dynamics produced divergent media narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic, how geopolitical rivalry shapes perceptions of immigrants, and how migrants’ local networks influence their perceptions of state repressive capacity. This body of work, which has appeared in journals including American Political Science Review and Sociological Forum, has also been recognized with several scholarly awards.