Welcoming New Scholars and Celebrating Achievements

Introducing new talent and highlighting our community's latest contributions.

Welcoming Jaylexia Clark 

CITAP is thrilled to announce that we have a new postdoctoral fellow joining the team: Jaylexia Clark. 

Jaylexia Clark recently graduated from the University of Notre Dame, where she obtained her Ph.D. in sociology with a minor in Quantitative Social Science. Her dissertation, "Racing Towards Global Racial Capitalism: Investigating the Relationship Between Racial/Gender Inequality and Platform Technology at Work," examines the intersection between platform technology and racial capitalism. In her research, she investigates whether the use of platform technology for income-earning activities creates new opportunities for labor participation or exacerbates the exploitation of women and racially marginalized workers. Through three different case studies, she demonstrates how gendered racial inequality is reproduced in the platform economy. In each case study, she finds that platform technology does not transform the extent to which occupations inherited by the platform economy are racialized and gendered. Rather, platform technologies help streamline the exploitative nature of historical racialized and gendered-capital relations. As a postdoctoral scholar, she will continue to explore themes related to her dissertation work on the intersection of race, technology, and labor. 

As Daniel Kreiss noted, 

“We could not be more excited to welcome Jaylexia to CITAP. With pathbreaking public-facing research, advocacy, and policy engagement on platform workers, Jaylexia will help CITAP’s researchers engage numerous stakeholders to create stronger, fairer, and more democratic media systems.”

Join us in welcoming Jaylexia to the team and looking forward to all of her impactful work alongside CITAP! 

Marie Heřmanová joining CITAP as Fulbright Scholar this fall 

Not only are we welcoming Jaylexia as a postdoc, but we are also looking forward to Marie Heřmanová joining this fall as a visiting Fulbright Scholar. Marie previously presented at our Misinformation and Marginalization Symposium, and we are thrilled to welcome her back for a longer stay. 

Marie ie Hermanova holds a PhD in social anthropology from Charles University. She finished her studies in 2018 with PhD thesis titled "Imagining the West - Marginality and Possible Lives at the Outskirts of a Mexican City". She conducted longterm ethnographic fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, from 2008 to 2015. She currently works as an associate researcher at the Gender and Sociology department at the Institute of Sociology, where she focuses on digital communication platforms, social media, internet culture, authenticity and gender norms. From January to July 2021 Marie was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Research for Communication and Culture at Loughborough University, UK. Besides her academic work, she writes for various Czech and international media. 

She will be working with Alice Marwick on “Gendered Disinformation and Disinformation about Gender on Social Media”; the project will address “the growing concerns about the proliferation of disinformation, with a particular focus on the intersection of gender and disinformation” with an aim to “provide a theoretical foundation for the understanding of how gender not only shapes disinformation narratives but also influences how these narratives are contextualized and further propagated by users in relation to their gender identity.” 

Alice expressed excitement about Marie joining us, noting, 

“Her research on conspiracy theories, spirituality, and female influencers provides valuable understanding as to how and why false narratives take root in online communities. She embodies the CITAP approach, using qualitative and ethnographic methods to understand the complex dynamics that impact technology and democracy.”

Publications and Appearances  

Francesca Tripodi joined NASIG 2024 in Washington to be a vision session speaker on June 4th where she spoke about “the importance of understanding how everyday Internet searching can and does influence what we think and the decisions we make. There are many areas of concern including ways in which search engines like Google are open to being manipulated to present preferred information that someone has paid for. This also affects AI and LLMs, for example due to their heavy foundational use of Wikipedia and Wikidata.” 

Affiliate Highlights 

Heesoo Jang, former CITAP GRA and future assistant professor of media law and ethics at UMass Amherst, was featured in a fantastic piece for UNC Research to tell the story of her research and why she came to UNC: “My research will always aim toward understanding how we can make sure that journalism works in a way that really serves the citizens and gives them information to participate in discussions that make their voices heard.” 

“Reactionary Exiles. How Conspiracy Theorists Deal with Socio-Technological Exclusion” was published on June 10, 2024. Co-authored by a CITAP Affiliate, Kami Grusauskaite, a Ph.D. candidate at KU Leuven in Belgium, the piece dives into “the question of how de-platformed ‘conspiracy theorists’ themselves experience and deal with such socio-technological exclusion. Drawing on seminal theories in the symbolic interactionist tradition, we conceptualize conspiracy theories as stigmatized ‘knowledge’ and empirically study the ways that conspiracy theory producers manage their stigma after de-platforming.”