My research explores the social dynamics of the digital environment.

My initial interests were in how class and race impact the use of technology, culminating in my first monograph – The Digital Practices of African-Americans.

In recent years, I have focused on crime and deviance in the digital environment. I have published research on darknets, cyberbullying, and phishing. A list of my published academic work can be found on my ORCID page.

Current Research

Exploring indicators of social change in the digital environment. My primary tool for exploring social change is sentiment analysis, an overlooked method that I believe is a useful way of quantifying and measuring the emotions and feelings of the public. Two works of mine speak to this strand of research:

1. A Sentiment Analysis of Men’s Comments on a Sex Work Forum. This book chapter discusses research on the ways men talk about their experiences with escorts in London, UK. The purpose of the research was to judge the degree to which men objectify women after a commercial sexual encounter.
2. Cultural Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position: The Emotions Present in Anti-Woke Discourse on Twitter (X). This research, currently at the revise and resubmit stage, focuses on the sentiment of fear in anti-woke discourse, and argues that Western society is shifting away from race and class cleavages to a cultural one, characterized by “woke” and “antiwoke.”

Exploring deviance online. I am currently exploring deviance in online spaces. A general nonfiction book entitled, The space between: Why there is so much incorrect, immoral, indecent, or just plain odd behavior online (proposal here). The title explains the question being asked. Through case studies of modern digital technologies, I show how deviance and social control play out in online spaces.