Welcome!
I’m an associate professor of Communication (and, by courtesy, Sociology), Richard E. Guggenhime Faculty Fellow, and HAI Senior Fellow at Stanford University. I study the social and cultural impact of digital technologies and AI through qualitative studies of professional sites transformed by digitization, computation, and automation.
My forthcoming book, Gurus, Hucksters, Entertainers: How Influencers Reshaped Social Media (Fall 2026, University of Chicago Press), examines content creators on social media platforms. Drawing on case studies ranging from drama channels to “dad” influencers and marketers, it shows how platforms, brands, and audiences reproduce precarity and inequality in social media careers, while nudging influencers toward a mix of commercial, inflammatory, and extreme content. I discussed it in the Ethnography Atelier podcast.
My award-winning book, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press, 2020) focused on journalism, analyzing the dramatic transformations of news organizations with digital and social media. It examined how journalists entered the chase for clicks in U.S. and French newsrooms, showing how American and French journalists made sense of traffic numbers in distinct ways, which shaped the news differently in the two countries.
In another project, I studied the role of technology and culture in criminal courts. I analyzed the reception of predictive algorithms in U.S. criminal courts, building on previous work I conducted on criminal sentencing in French courts. I also have a longstanding interest in AI ethics, examining how the discourse of ethical, accountable, and safe AI emerged in Silicon Valley, as well as the contradictions shaping the work of “ethics entrepreneurs” in tech companies and beyond.
These days I’m spending a lot of time with astrophysicists, astronomers, and cosmologists, asking questions about how they use AI for scientific discovery.
At Stanford I lead the Technology, Culture, and Power Speaker Series, a monthly gathering on the interactions of digital technologies, culture, and inequality. I serve as a co-editor of the Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology at Princeton University Press.
I am not accepting new MA students or Honors advisees at this point. Due to the volume of requests, I cannot schedule individual calls with prospective PhD students or host visiting students/scholars at Stanford. I’m doing the best I can to answer emails, but many slip through the cracks.
If you wonder how to pronounce my first name (many people do), the Belgian singer Angèle does it really well here.
Selected publications:
“The Politics of Engagement in Platform Governance.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Politics and Social Sciences. 715 (1): 156-175. (with B. Lewis)
“Same Stereotypes, Different Term? Understanding the “Global South” in AI Ethics.” Proceedings of the Eighth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2025): 2081-2893 (with E. Radiya-Dixit)
“Internal Fractures: The Competing Logics of Social Media Platforms.” Social Media + Society 10(3) (with M. S. Bernstein, J. T. Hancock, C. Jia., M. N. Mado, J. L. Tsai, and C. Xu)
“Walking the Walk of AI Ethics: Organizational Challenges and the Individualization of Risk among Ethics Entrepreneurs.” 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’23), June 12–15, 2023, Chicago, IL, USA (with S. Ali, A. Smart, and R. Katila)
“The Influencer Pay Gap: Platform Labor Meets Racial Capitalism.” New Media & Society: 1-24 (with Y. Lu)
“The Drama of Metrics: Status, Spectacle, and Resistance Among YouTube Drama Creators.” Social Media + Society: 1:14 (with R. Lewis)
“The Ethnographer and the Algorithm: Beyond the Black Box.” Theory & Society. Online First, 1-22.
“Technologies of Crime Prediction: The Reception of Algorithms in Policing and Criminal Courts,” Social Problems Online First 1-17 (with S. Brayne)
“Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control” Academy of Management Annals 14(1): 366-410. (with K. Kellogg and M. Valentine)
“Counting Clicks: Quantification and Variation in Web Journalism in the United States and France.” American Journal of Sociology 123 (5): 1382-1415.
“Algorithms in Practice: Comparing Web Journalism and Criminal Justice.” Big Data & Society 4 (2): 1-14.