Throughout both my academic and professional career, I have remained steadfast in my dedication to making data accessible to people from a diversity of backgrounds and worldviews in public, private, and educational settings. I am deeply committed to helping people and leveraging modern data sets and tools to pursue social welfare.
Culture of Democracy: Community, Norms, and Technology in the United States
My dissertation examines how technology has fundamentally changed how people connect,form community, and learn vital social and democratic norms. I draw from civic republicanism and communitarianism to argue that technology places a barrier between communicating parties and makes it more difficult for people to connect their online experiences with their responsibilities and obligations as both members of a community and a democracy. I conducted 30 semi-structured interviews whose findings suggest that without significant changes to how technology is structured and used, younger generations (Alpha & Beta) may not learn the norms necessary to sustain social or political life.
Are Climate Mentions Partisan? An Analysis of Local Political Meetings
Co-authored project with Dr. Alicia Cooperman and Dr. Sara Constantino investigating whether mentions of climate change in local political meetings are partisan. The project marshalls several large data sets to determine whether extreme weather events influence what is discussed in local political meetings. The work is two-fold. First, we look directly at mentions of climate change or global warming in over 100,000 local political meetings. Second, we use text analysis to determine how climate change and global warming are discussed.
Local News Access & Political Participation | 2022
University of California - Irvine | Second Qualifying Paper
Corporate Citizenship & the Threat to Democracy: Unions as a Counterbalance | 2021
University of California - Irvine | First Qualifying Paper
Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association: Union Security, Campaign Finance, and the First Amendment | 2017
California State University - Fullerton | Masters Thesis
Deliberative Democracy and the Media it Requires | 2012
California State Polytechnic University - Pomona | Bachelors Capstone Paper