This project was conducted as part of CIS 605: Cultural and Critical Theory in Communication at the University of Alabama, a course that surveys foundational cultural and critical theories in communication. On this page, I introduce myself as a scholar, situate my positionality, and explain the personal, intellectual, and disciplinary standpoint from which I approach communication research and practice.

Who Am I?

I am a media psychology and a quantitative scholar. My training is STEM-oriented: I work primarily with structural equation modeling (SEM), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to generate empirically testable models of media effects. This methodological orientation places me within a school of thought that treats digital media as tool whose design features can potentially produce measurable psychological consequences for users. I came to this focus through a growing awareness that platforms through which so many people now construct and perform their sense of self are themselves structured by economic imperatives and design logics that are largely invisible to users. I believe that scholarship in this area carries a genuine obligation to the populations it studies.
In Routlege’s framing, media psychology is the applied study of what happens when people interact with media as producers, distributors, and consumers, examined through the lens of psychological theory. That definition aligns with my work because it refuses to treat the human-media relationship as unidirectional or static. I see digital media use as a transactional, bidirectional process: users shape platforms through their behavior, while platforms simultaneously shape users through the affordances they offer. As Valkenburg and Peter (2013) established in their Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model, individuals vary considerably in how and why they are affected by media  and understanding those mechanisms is a prerequisite for meaningful intervention, whether at the platform, clinical, or policy level.