My research focuses on digital labor, social media industries, and resistance to platformized precarity. Drawing on my background in anthropology and media and cultural studies, I use a range of qualitative methods - including digital ethnography, interviews, discourse analysis, and textual analysis - as well as theoretical approaches to ask and answer questions about the construction of cultural and creative industries and the people who work in them. 

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I am currently working on my dissertation, which critically examines the intermediaries that have emerged in the absence of more formal regulation and recognition of the influencer industry as an industry and influencers and creators as a class of creative workers. This research charts the changing expectations surrounding work in the creator economy and examines the construction of the social media entertainment industry itself. Each chapter examines a different intermediary in the influencer industry, including platforms, influencer marketing agencies, emerging trade associations and guilds, influencer “schools” and educational programs, and payment apps and review platforms that allow influencers to anonymously rate their experiences with brands and share how much they were paid. I use theoretical frameworks from feminist media studies, critical media industry studies, and platform studies to argue that these intermediaries work to legitimize the influencer industry as an industry and construct value around influencers as a class of professional workers. While the emergence of the influencer industry was once characterized by forms of aspirational labor and entrepreneurial brand devotion, my dissertation demonstrates a growing trend of resistance to prevailing forms of precarity within the industry. Although many of these efforts seek to create better working conditions, I argue that attempts to formalize and professionalize the influencer industry contribute to the construction of boundaries and borders around the industry with the potential to further marginalize and exclude already precarious creators. Ultimately, this research contributes to broader understandings of the struggle to construct value around digital labor, strategies for resistance to platformized precarity, and the continued narrowing of cultural production in pursuit of legitimacy.​

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Take a look at my published work or read more about what I'm currently working on below.