Research

You can check out my Projects page for a list of current and completed projects and my Publications page for my published work. I also give a lot of Talks and some of these have been recorded, check them out. I have had the privilege to work with amazing students, and you can find more information about student projects on the Students page. If you are interested in working with me please get in touch via email (include your interests, educational background and a CV).

Years ago when I started my PhD work, I was mostly interested in the role technologies played in how people manage their relationships and social practices. It was a time of fierce (though rather silly) debate among academics on whether the Internet improved or impoverished social interaction. My dissertation demonstrated that it’s not either or, but it’s complicated. I found that the use of communication technology can change relational dynamics by creating new obligations, invalidating old expectations and forcing people to work out different norms and practices to achieve essentially the same social ends of sociability.

These days I am much more concerned with data, privacy, ethics in technology development, and issues of justice and governance, but my original relational approach to thinking about technology remains. I am entirely methodologically pragmatic – I do not have strong opinions about different methods, I just see them as useful tools for the job at hand provided we can keep in mind their drawbacks and limitations. Yet if you are going to use any tool, it pays to understand its origins, possibilities and limitations deeply, so I nerd out on methods from ethnography to quantitate data analysis with equal glee.