My research is grounded in critical cultural studies and sociotechnical perspectives, with a particular focus on the influencer and tech industries, platforms, and labor. I use a range of qualitative methods, including discursive and textual analysis, interviews, and digital ethnography, to ask and answer questions about digital media industries and the people who work in them.
I am currently working on my first book project, which examines shifting expectations around work in the influencer industry and creator economy. In this research, I chart a growing trend of collective action and resistance to prevailing forms of platformized precarity that characterize the working conditions of influencers and creators. I use theoretical frameworks from feminist media studies, critical media industry studies, and production studies to theorize how creators and influencers attempt to create collectives and solidarities across social media industries to protect their interests as workers and shape the industry itself in ways that potentially benefit them. Upcoming Conferences
- Association of Internet Researchers, October 15-18 2025, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (remote presentation)
- GenAI and Creative Practices: Past, Present, and Future, University of Amsterdam, December 17-18 2025
Current Works in Progress
Fuck You, Pay Me: Payment Apps, Review Platforms, and Ambivalent Resistance in the Influencer Industry
This research critically examines emerging intermediaries in the influencer industry that aggregate anonymous reviews of brands and allow influencers to report how much they were paid. Turning to four intermediaries (FYPM, Willa, Hashtag Pay Me, and Clara for Creators), I argue that although these emerging intermediaries represent an important step towards creating more equity in the influencer industry, these efforts are a double-edged sword and represent a form of ambivalent resistance to broader structures governing the industry. While these intermediaries are used to resist the precarity of platformized and branded cultural production, these transactions have the potential to be co-opted—used for surveillance and data tracking by brands, platforms, and corporations—potentially blunting emerging forms of collective action and solidarity. Ultimately, these intermediaries provide an opportunity to theorize forms of resistance to precarity as neither “top-down” nor “bottom-up,” but rather a means of negotiating and navigating power from limited and precarious positions.
Poisoning the Well: The Battle for Creative Control in the Era of Generative AI with Dr. Zoë Glatt
This research explores how platforms are discursively constructing and promoting generative AI tools, how creators are resisting this incursion, and how intermediaries have emerged to capitalize on the excitement and trepidation surrounding AI. We draw on corporate promotional materials such as platform blogs and generative AI tool announcements from YouTube, Meta, and TikTok; websites, white papers, and promotional materials about tools created to resist AI scraping from emerging intermediaries, including Overlai, Nightshade, and Glaze; and popular and trade press articles about generative AI, platforms, and debates around intellectual property. We argue that, in the absence of a more formalized and regulated industrial terrain, intermediaries have emerged to fill the gap, engaging in ambivalent efforts to shape the industry and the battle for creative control in the absence of more formal regulation of generative AI.
“Rad Futures”: Examining the Emergence of Nuclear Energy Influencers with Allyson Gross
This research examines the emergence of nuclear energy influencers on Instagram and TikTok. Using the influencer Isodope as a case study, this research blends a visual rhetorical analysis with a critical media industry studies approach to examine how nuclear energy influencers utilize social media platforms to make persuasive a particular vision of technoscientific futures. We argue that nuclear energy influencing serves to obscure and defang the risks, controversies, and complexities of nuclear power via creative practices shaped by the logic of platformization.
Dr. Sarah Edwards 