Teaching

I am currently an Associate Professor and Chair for the Department of Communications, Film, and Journalism at Saint Joseph’s University. I teach classes that aim to help students understand the complicated relationship between media and society. Mainly I am concerned with how our digital media environment shapes and distributes power in our world. I teach classes in Media Ethics, Advocacy Media, Privacy and Surveillance, and Social Documentary Photography. Most of my courses are project based, where the goal is not only to critique the current digital media landscape, but to learn by producing objects for it as well.

Research

I first started researching digital media in the early 2000s, before social media was even a thing, when people had individual blogs, and mostly people hand scripted websites. In the early days of digital media, and even in the nascent days of Friendster and MySpace, it seemed that digital media afforded an opportunity to rethink how media constituted power, redistributing what broadcast media had concentrated. Alas, we have lived a different story, one that is fairly typical of emergent technologies, where technologies that rhetorically promise to disrupt actually see a centralization of power. I research the ways in which these companies increasingly influence social spaces and concentrate power in the hands of a few, often with serious negative social consequences. While I value digital media, I believe we need to be intentional about working against the power concentration that has occurred.