Some things I research
Profiles
Summary of Research
My research interests broadly explore the social and political consequences of digitalization. I am interested in understanding how social problems are mediated and configured through digital technologies and their supporting infrastructures, and how these broader societal questions come to bear on domains typically associated with welfare states, social care systems, human service organizations, and helping professions such as social work. My work is informed by my extensive experience working in human service organizations and social care ecosystems, research mentors whose expertise includes organizations and social economies, and a strong affinity for critical data studies and science and technology studies. I bring these lenses to making sense of how concepts such as the digital divide, digital exclusion, and digital inclusion are named, enacted, and codified into service ecosystems, program models, and research agendas, and how these categories structure what becomes knowable or actionable as a social problem.
My work involves studying the uneven diffusion of innovations, including technological and conceptual, across these social systems. I am particularly interested in the material consequences of diffusion, especially among vulnerable and marginalized communities. I am also interested in the meaning-making and interpretive processes about innovations, which may lead to non-adoption, resistance, refusal, or the creation of alternative innovations and practices. These activities can occur through behaviors and organizational forms that I tend to view through lenses of social and solidarity economies, social enterprises, social entrepreneurship, and social innovation.
My research practice is heavily influenced by an ongoing immersion in communities of scholarly practice at The Graduate Center whose work is rooted in the digital humanities and critical social sciences. This work often involves creating educational workshops and materials for digital skills development, and increasingly informs my interest in how publics and practitioners learn to interpret, question, or resist technologically-mediated forms of knowledge. I explore these questions in multiple reflexive practice spaces such as peer-led focused inquiry groups. These have helped me to develop working literacy in several programming languages, apply some principles of data visualization and design to my work, adopt humanistic inquiry into digital media, and remain hopefully skeptical of tech hype in education and society.
I am also influenced by the tradition of public scholarship that thrives at The Graduate Center, which draws me to participate in public and practitioner-focused events and conferences such as The NYC School of Data, The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC), and the NYC Public Interest Technology Pop-Up. These public-facing contexts help shape my thinking about how civic data infrastructures, open data, and other forms of computational technology mediate democratic participation and public sensemaking about social problems. Having managed scholarly communications for several years during my PhD, I am also quite active in scientific communities on social media, especially Bluesky and LinkedIn.
Recent Projects
- Curating and guest editing a special issue of Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership, & Governance with The Social Work Innovation Network, which brought together global perspectives on on social innovation, social enterprise, and social entrepreneurship in social work in human services. The special issues is now fully published and available online here.
- Participating in civic tech communities of practice and developing materials to teach critical open data literacy aimed at human service workers. This project is ongoing. Read a short research report here.
- Convening an integrative view of recent literature (peer-reviewed publications, white papers, and professional media) on social work and artificial intelligence to assess to what extent structural concerns regarding technology and society appeared. The manuscript has been accepted for publication and the research team has several upcoming conference presentations, including the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) and the European Conference on Social Work Research (ECSWR). Read about the SSWR presentation here.
- Conducting an empirical study of how social work students learn about and discuss technologies in their practicum settings and education. This project has been presented at several conferences and is continuing data collection and analysis as we work towards writing up a paper with the findings and recommendations. Watch a short video of the project earlier in its development here.
- Synthesizing critical management and organization studies and critical social work as lenses for intepreting affect, embodiment, and positionality in organizational research. This project is in early stages of development.
- Participating in an interdisciplinary critical AI literacy focused inquiry group comprised of doctoral students who are also educators, where I examined organizational and institutional contexts. We recently presented our findings and our developing a paper. The presentation recording is here.
