I am a doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a graduate affiliate with UNC’s Center for Information Technology and Public Life (CITAP).

My research focuses, broadly, on social media, gender, and inequality. I am particularly interested in the ways digital platforms may counter, mirror, or exacerbate extant social inequalities and how they may produce new inequalities.

My dissertation examines how inequalities linked to physical appearance intersect with processes of surveillance and pushback; social comparison and belonging; and leveraging credentials and authority across digital platforms.

My master’s thesis employed qualitative and computational methods to investigate the factors allowing misogynist involuntary celibates (incels) on Reddit to identify with the openly self-derogating incel community. Using thematic qualitative analysis to compare Reddit posts from misogynist incel subreddits to posts from r/MGTOW, a subreddit catering to the male separatist Men Going Their Own Way community, I found that misogynist incels and male separatists alike evaluated men as a broader ingroup more positively than women as a broader outgroup. Misogynist incels struck a patriarchal bargain, voluntarily positioning themselves at the bottom of a masculine hierarchy in order to enjoy some, if not all, of the benefits inherent in perpetuating a patriarchal social structure. You can check out published work from my master’s thesis in Social Psychology Quarterly.

Through UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP), I have served as a graduate research assistant on Associate Professor of Communication Alice Marwick’s Carnegie Foundation-funded Redpills and Radicalization project. The project employs qualitative and ethnographic methods to critically investigate online far-right radicalization. A comprehensive, interdisciplinary literature review looking at online far-right radicalization in connection to this project is available for download through CITAP’s Bulletin of Information Technology and Public Life.

For more information, visit my website.