An essay I wrote about travel guide Rick Steves and his philosophy of travel was published in the July issue of The Hedgehog Review, a popular journal based at the University of Virginia. The essay was adapted from research forthcoming with the peer reviewed journal, Material Religion. I argue that travel is more than a consumptive practice - we should use the lens of religion to examine it as a “cosmopolitan revelation” and Rick Steves is a “civil religionist.”
Read MoreI am excited to announce that my article, “Audience Agency in Social Performance,” published in 2022 in Cultural Sociology, is the winner of the British Sociological Association’s SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence!
Read MoreOn November 11, 2021, I presented my paper “Reimagining Charisma” to an invited panel entitled “New Directions for Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion” at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association in Philadelphia, PA.
It was exciting to be back to in-person conferencing, and I want to thank the session organizer, Sadia Saeed, for inviting me to participate on the panel with senior scholars Mark Gould and Paul Joosse.
Read MoreWell, after three-months of rigorous work, I can now say that my time as a PhD intern with Twitter Research has come to a close. For the last 12 weeks, I have designed and executed a qualitative research study (n=24) on relational and interests-based engagement on the Home timeline. I focused on in-depth interviews, and conducted them over Google Meet - a new platform for me, but it was super easy and we were able to do screensharing! I also collaborated with stakeholders in Product, Design, Eng, and Data Science on the project.
Read MoreI am excited to announce that I will be a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder for the 2021-2022 academic year. I will be working with Deborah Whitehead (Religious Studies), Nabil Echchaibi (Media Studies, Religious Studies), and Stewart Hoover (Media Studies). I will attend their weekly research meetings, present research, and have the opportunity to be mentored by these three amazing scholars. I also look forward to meeting and working with other scholars at the center. My hope is that this year I can sharpen my knowledge of media studies literature, and strengthen my research agenda on digital media, social media technology, and how these things intersect with religion.
Read MoreI am excited to announce that in June I will join Twitter Research as PhD Intern focusing on qualitative research. This remote, paid position will be 12-weeks, and I look forward to learning from and collaborating with industry researchers at this dynamic company. I hope to learn new methodologies, especially (if given the chance!) focus groups and card sorting.
Read MoreThe pandemic is changing everything, isn’t it? I was supposed to complete a two-week research trip to the UK, and that was cancelled. Now it looks like my two-month research trip to Italy and the UK, and my fellowship at UCL College of Media and Communication, in May-June will also be cancelled. I have started to adapt. It looks like one of my research sites is moving their group entirely online, and I will be able to start digital ethnography. I will be learning on the fly, but aren’t we all?
Read MoreIn the 2016 election cycle, I worked for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Those months are a blur. In October 2015 I was an eager volunteer in a student group at the University of Colorado Boulder; within two months the campaign hired me as their first field organizer in the state. Four months of working 16-hour days, seven days a week with a large, devoted team of volunteers, resulted in Sanders winning the caucus in my territory by 20.2 percentage points. Satisfied (and tired), I left the campaign to finish my Bachelor’s degree in sociology. And then, inexplicably, I was harassed by a “Bernie Bro.”
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