Current Projects

Collaborative Research Initiatives

  • Since January 2026, I have been part of a Georgetown-based research team developing tools to help public institutions communicate more effectively during elections, public health crises, and other emergencies. The aim is a shared infrastructure that serves two constituencies at once, first researchers studying information integrity, and second, the officials who must counter misinformation under acute time pressure.

Ongoing Independent Projects

  • My most recent project traces how platforms abandoned age-appropriate design in favor of routing children into age-agnostic social media, where minors are subject to the same logics of virality, performance, and data extraction that govern adult users. I grew up, as many in my cohort did, on Club Penguin, Wizard101, and Fantage, and the disappearance of these child-specific digital spaces is the puzzle the project sets out to explain. The work is genuinely a search for the “why,” and it has the side benefit of sending me hunting for archived and fan-run revivals of the games I played as a kid, which has turned out to be a good way to spend a break.

  • I am also developing a qualitative study of how recommendation algorithms fail to distinguish identity-based engagement from allyship-based engagement, and how that failure reshapes the boundaries of digital community spaces, particularly for Black creators and LGBTQ+ communities. I argue that this algorithmic illegibility—I am still settling on the term—converts intimate community spaces into sites of external scrutiny, as content produced for in-group audiences is surfaced to viewers it was never meant to reach. The study also attends to the affective and creative labor that creators expend when they must continually calibrate a single piece of content for several audiences at once.

  • On the passion-project side, I have been conducting a historical analysis of Pinboard, the bookmarking service launched in 2009. Its founder, Maciej Cegłowski, maintained a public Google Doc that invited users to shape the platform’s development in real time. The case offers an unusually clear instance of user-led platform design, and my interest lies less in documenting it than in explaining why it remained exceptional rather than becoming a model others followed.

Idea Dump

Unrefined concepts I am actively sketching out. Several may already be well-covered in literature I have not yet had the chance to read.

More digital-sociology flavored

  • How does the rapid circulation of fictitious media (Listenbourg, Goncharov, Zepotha) affect user trust, collective memory, and the construction of cultural legitimacy in digital environments?

  • Is the internet still best understood through Oldenburg’s “third place” or Habermas’s “public sphere,” or does the algorithmic fragmentation of communal interaction call for new conceptual models?

  • What structural and economic conditions produced the collapse of child-specific digital environments, and how have platform business models systematically deprioritized children as a public with distinct developmental needs?

More HCI/psychology flavored

  • In what ways do users’ strategies for managing algorithms (positive versus negative feedback) reflect broader orientations toward control, agency, and self-determination in intimate life, and how are those orientations distributed across gender, class, and educational attainment?

  • How does deliberate algorithmic training, through positive or negative signals, reshape users’ folk theories of platform function, and does perceived algorithmic legibility correlate with greater or lesser emotional investment in outcomes?

  • When users anthropomorphize algorithms as entities with moods, preferences, or punitive intentions, does that framing enable tactical resistance and collective knowledge-sharing, or does it naturalize platform power by displacing institutional accountability onto imagined technical agents?

  • What are the affective and temporal costs of algorithmic hygiene practices, and do users who invest heavily in training their feeds experience that labor as empowering curation or as exhausting maintenance?