Programs › Boston, MA
Examines the politics of design and emerging technologies such as smart cities, automation, and wearable medical devices through participatory workshops and speculative prototypes.
Focuses on the changing state of the news media, China, and race and class in America, drawing on a career in business and international journalism.
Studies the future of local and community news, including media startups and news deserts, alongside media criticism, ethics, and the First Amendment.
Uses conversation analysis of recorded calls to study how people manage action and crisis talk in 911 emergency dispatch, police negotiations, and customer service call centers.
Studies how publics and decision-makers come to understand complex science and technology issues such as climate change, analyzing the influence of ideas, expertise, journalism, and philanthropy.
Studies institutional innovation and the responsible design of collective intelligence and AI to strengthen democratic institutions, open government, and public problem-solving.
Studies the history of information, tracing how paper technologies such as the filing cabinet shaped information, work, and organization, alongside DIY independent music culture.
Investigates how mobile and locative media, location-based games, and mobile media art shape urban mobility and interaction with public spaces, primarily in the Global South.
Studies strategic, health, and science communication with under-represented communities, co-creating fotonovelas, radio stories, and games on mental health stigma, violence, and vaccines.
Studies how online communication networks enable individual, team, and collective goals, including networked counterpublics and online activism, using network science and computational methods.
Studies AI and media, social media platform governance and free speech, and news and knowledge in networked environments, and builds AI literacy tools.
Studies how disabled and autistic young people and their families use mobile and digital media, examining the social, cultural, and health implications of communication technologies.
Builds creative data storytelling and computational journalism tools for social justice, including community data murals, AI civic technologies, and computational analyses of news coverage.
Analyzes the rhetoric of race and public policy in the US, including immigration reform, policing, voting rights, and the civil rights legacy, with a focus on political rhetoric and policy debates.
Studies the spread and consequences of misinformation on digital media and develops countermeasures, especially the role of AI and algorithmic literacy, from a media psychology perspective.
Studies public memory, race, gender, and representation at the nexus of rhetoric and media, including African American cultural memory in the US South and rhetorics of respectability.
Studies communication law and policy, infrastructure politics, and cybersecurity governance, tracing how infrastructure security and markets such as bug bounties are governed.
Studies how traditional and digital communication can reduce health disparities among Black populations, including social media and mental health and digital tools for Black maternal health.
Writes narrative journalism on the history of race and identity, drawing on reporting and oral histories with elders across the country.
Studies digital media and politics, using experiments to test effects of digital communication on voter turnout and digital trace data to measure online political behavior.
Studies feminist journalism history, recovering women's overlooked contributions with archival and computational methods, and researches solutions to local news deserts.
Writes about crowdsourcing and massive online collaboration and how networked technologies are reshaping business and society.
Studies the psychological, physiological, and behavioral effects of narrative games, XR, and apps as digital health interventions, especially for child obesity and physical activity.
Studies how exposure to media risk information about COVID-19, environmental toxins, and cancer shapes risk perceptions and protective health behaviors, using quantitative methods.
Studies dyadic and joint decision-making between partners and its influence on consumer behavior, along with data-driven consumer welfare interventions, using quantitative and qualitative research.
Studies organizational, interpersonal, and health communication.
Studies online culture and digital communities, including Wikipedia collaboration, online comments, life hacking, and geek feminism.
Studies organizational and crisis communication, critiques theories of strategic ambiguity, and examines sports fan subculture and communication surrounding the 1970 Kent State shootings.
Examines how people use and misuse social cues in the workplace and how these cues shape managerial decision-making, technology adoption, and equity in organizations.
Studies how people understand, trust, and collaborate with conversational AI, using metaphor analysis and persona design to build voice and LLM agents for healthcare and aging.
Studies how trans and neurodivergent communities understand and adapt to algorithmic curation and content moderation, using grounded theory and participatory, community-centered design.
Studies how emerging media technologies shape attitudes and behavior, how to align social media AI with democratic values, and how to mitigate misinformation, bridging mass communication and HCI.
Develops network and complex-systems tools to study information and emergence in networks, applying them to data justice in the US criminal-legal system and to team coordination in elite sports.
Studies science, risk, and environmental communication, examining how place-based relationships shape public responses to renewable and geothermal energy, natural hazards, and climate change.
Studies the politics of data and classification in sociotechnical systems, using ethnography of China's social credit system, contact tracing, generative AI, and public health classification.
Combines social and network science to study how team networks enable collaboration and innovation, including NASA simulated space-mission crews and cross-boundary science teams.
Conducts design-based research on how people learn with virtual reality, examining how design features shape learners' agency, emotions, identities, and learning outcomes.
Studies online trust and safety professionals and compliance vendors for content moderation and AI safety, using interviews, discourse analysis, and online field experiments.
Studies digital communication, international and intercultural dynamics, and digital activism, using affective-discursive social media analysis of cases such as China's digital manosphere.
Develops deep learning, computer vision, NLP, and network methods to analyze visual and verbal political framing in news and photojournalism, and studies political neuroscience.