Research Aims & Interests

My work aims to call out and draw attention to the harmful rhetorics that are often embedded into visual media and digital technologies. Often hidden beneath a veneer of convenience, ease, and usefulness, these ideals are often overlooked or unrecognized by the general public—a reality that allows them to hide in plain sight and continue circulating among the masses. disseminating often hateful and discriminatory historical patterns of in a manner often missed by the general public. I examine and highlight the presence of these concealed messages in all of my scholarship because I believe that we cannot begin to truly understand our society and its hegemonic structures—let alone challenge or change them—until we see, understand, and acknowledge how divisive and prejudicial ideologies continue to circulate within our society even when obscured or apparently absent. My research interrogates the continued presence and prevalence of discriminatory logics in spaces we may not expect to find them, demonstrating just how deeply our cultures are entrenched in dynamics of power, sovereignty, and conquest that those in power claim exist solely in the distant past.

In my current project, this interrogation means analyzing how and why contemporary AI-powered virtual assistants and chatbots like Amazon’s Alexa and OpenAI’s ChatGPT remain haunted by and programmed according to the specters of Black women’s domestic labor in the United States. You can read more about that in my forthcoming monograph, which is currently in preparation; in the meantime, you can find my present work listed below.