This project was conducted as part of CIS 605: Cultural and Critical Theory in Communication at the University of Alabama. On this page, I position my work within communication and related interdisciplinary spaces by explaining the disciplinary traditions, boundaries, and intellectual conversations that shape how I understand my scholarship.

Disciplinary Positionality

My conceptual vision is interdisciplinary. I use social psychological theories to explain emerging concepts in communication. My sub-disciplinary home is the study of media effects, approached with a contemporary and critical inflection. Cultivation theory provides evidence that long-term, cumulative exposure to media shapes perceptions of social reality. Applied to digital media, algorithmic amplification accelerates and intensifies these cultivation effects, creating information environments where distorted social comparisons become unavoidable. Social Comparison Theory (Festinger, 1954) offers a complementary mechanism: platforms architecturally designed to facilitate near-constant upward comparison may potentially erode self-worth and fragment the self.