Urban Communication & Rhetorics of Place
My research explores how public discourse, media representations, and emerging technologies impact city spaces and urban communities. Drawing on my scholarly background in communication studies, the urban focus of my research views cities as fundamental sites of human interaction as well as crucial contexts for enactments of citizenship and the formation of subjectivities. This approach is guided by an issue-driven orientation toward concerns of power and inequality. I primarily utilize qualitative research methods and a critical-cultural perspective to examine how communicative processes are implicated in the reproduction of spatial disparities, the marginalization of vulnerable communities, and emplaced efforts of social justice advocacy and activism. My past research has focused especially on neighborhood gentrification through various forms of displacement and dispossession.
My current research project investigates the discursive construction of contemporary urban imaginaries premised upon emergent media infrastructures and technological platforms. Focusing on site-specific urban intrusions from three exemplars of platform capitalism — namely Amazon, Google, and Uber — this project offers a unique scholarly intervention by situating these recent cases within a broader history of spatial and technological discourse. My analysis is grounded in case studies of community advocacy and opposition relating to issues of environmental justice in Newark, mobility equity in Pittsburgh, and data accountability in Toronto. This mixed methods research combines discourse analysis, intellectual history, and visual-ethnographic fieldwork to chart a critical cartography of how these rhetorical practices are implicated in current debates over urban inequality and contemporary enactments of civic engagement.