About
I am a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan. I research the racial politics of digital technologies, with a focus on labor, well-being, and pathways for repair. I am grateful to have my research supported by the 2023 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the 2023/2025 National Center for Institutional Diversity Anti-Racism Grant. I have co-published a survey analysis of attitudes toward reparations for Black Americans in the Russell Sage Journal of Social Sciences, as well as public-facing reports on attitudes toward reparations through the Ford School of Public Policy Center for Racial Justice. As a member of the Bodies, Identities, Intimacies, and Technologies (BIIT) Lab, I am collaborating with Feeld, a dating app, to engage in equitable human-centered design using mixed methods approaches. My work has previously appeared in The Detroit Free Press, Bridge Detroit, and CBS News Detroit.
Dissertation: "Between Productivity and Imagination: Black Entrepreneurs’ Sensemaking of Digital Technologies for Work"
Previous scholars have attended to how entrepreneurial activity among Black Americans can be conceptualized as both an individual solution to employment discrimination, an alternative to employment, and a collective solution to racial economic self-determination (Wingfield 2008; Bento & Brown 2021). My research project uncovers how Black entrepreneurs think of their own labor, how they think of their relationships to others in their community, and how they view entrepreneurship as a path toward resistance. Secondarily, I hope to the role that digital technologies play in shaping these ideas for Black entrepreneurs. These technologies include online platforms that serve as virtual shops, customer tracking databases, alternative lending platforms, and, of course, language learning models/artificial intelligence. Although marketing for these technologies depicts them as supercharged tools to assist the lone entrepreneur, scholars argue that the platforms that own these technologies offer them on expensive, precarious, and therefore, predatory terms (McMillan Cottom 2020). The precarity of these digital tools, despite the marketed symbology around them as modern, accessible products, has important implications for understanding the persistence of racial inequality.
Committee:
+ Erin Cech (Chair), Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan
+ Paige Sweet, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan
+ Apryl Williams, Associate Professor of Media & Communications, University of Michigan
+ Karyn Lacy, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan
+ Corey Fields, Associate Professor of Sociology, Georgetown University
