A couple of years ago, I worked with a graduate student to examine the geographic and linguistic diversity in an online Community of Christ ministry that made an intentional effort to cross borders during the COVID-19 pandemic (and before and since, but for all of the obvious reasons, this was particularly pronounced during the pandemic). I was pleased with how the work went and was eager to get it to publication. I’m happy to announce that that’s finally happened, thanks to the Journal of Media and Religion.

I’ve repeatedly referenced 20th century French technology scholar Jacques Ellul on my blog(s) since the beginning of the year. While my interest in Ellul’s work is also personal and political, I wrote back in February that one of the main reasons I’m reading a lot of Ellul right now is to add a stronger theoretical foundation to my scholarly work.

With that context in mind, I’m happy to share that my first Ellul-inspired article has just been published in the Journal of Computing and Higher Education! After I wrote this post on what Ellul had to say about the value of research, Stephanie Moore was kind enough to invite me to expand my thoughts there into a contribution for a special issue of that journal that she was putting together on “The Research We Need” in educational technology.

I’m pleased to be able to finally share the publication in the British Journal of Educational Technology of an article that Dan Krutka and I have been working on for some time, which documents activity in a teachers’ group on a far-right social media platform (which we intentionally don’t identify within the paper). Here’s a link to a full-text, read-only version of the article, and here’s the abstract as a preview:

For the past couple of years, my colleague Dr. Meghan Dowell and I have been working on a paper on students’ awareness of what data the Canvas learning management system collects (and subsequently makes available to certain stakeholders). I’m a fan of Nick Proferes’s paper [Information Flow Solipsism in an Exploratory Study of Beliefs About Twitter] and have long wanted to do something similar related to LMSs. This is even more Meghan’s area of specialty than mine, though, so I was grateful that she was also interested in the subject and took the lead in turning this idea into reality.

Last year, Daniela DiGiacomo, Sarah Barriage, and I published an article on student and principal perceptions of ClassDojo. Our findings weren’t entirely what we expected, even if they weren’t a huge surprise. In short, students and practitioners don’t always share the concerns about edtech platforms (like ClassDojo) that are gaining steam in the critical educational technology literature. I don’t say this to shame edtech users for not thinking the way that we ivory tower types do—rather, it speaks to a long-recognized tension between theoretical and conceptual concerns held by academics vs. the practical concerns held by those outside the academy.

Late last year, I announced the publication of a study I participated in with Dr. Evan Brody and UK PhD student Mehroz Sajjad where we examined LGBTQ+-friendly spaces on the Gab social media platform. Although that was the main focus of our research project, we also found as we were completing it that there were a number of LGBTQ+-friendly spaces that had been overrun by queerphobic activity and discourses. I’m happy to announce that our second paper, focusing on those specific spaces, has just been published in the Journal of Homosexuality. Here’s the abstract:

I am very happy to announce that a paper I wrote with Amy Chapman is finally published and available open access in the Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association (I have also archived a PDF of the article on my website, available at this link). Amy and I began this project in the spring/summer of 2019, so it’s a relief to finally see our first paper in print.

In short, the paper is a descriptive look at tweets using the #DezNat hashtag; DezNat, short for either Deseret Nation or Deseret Nationalism (depending on who you ask) is a movement of arch-conservative Mormons on Twitter and elsewhere on the internet. As an internet researcher with a deep familiarity with Mormonism, I felt like this was perfect research for me to tackle (something I’ve written about before). We qualitatively coded 1,378 screenshots of tweets (part of the reason that this took so long to get to print), and wound up with a wealth of data and findings. This first paper is focused on red pill (i.e., far-right and anti-feminist) influences in the hashtag, making a scholarly contribution to some of the popular and media discussions about the DezNat movement. Here’s the abstract for the paper:

This article has been available online for nearly two years, but since I don’t have any previous posts about it, I’m happy to announce that a study of mine with Dan Krutka has just been assigned to an issue at the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. A number of years ago, Twitter released some large datasets of tweets associated with accounts created as part of various governments’ information operation efforts. Neither misinformation nor information operations are a specialty of mine, but I was interested in seeing if these datasets overlapped with work that I was involved in. So, one day, I downloaded the datasets, loaded them all into R, and searched for some terms germane to my research. That’s how, a couple of years ago, I produced a paper on government-sponsored accounts’ invocations of Mormonism as part of efforts to sow discord in the United States.

I’m very excited to share that I’ve just had an article published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, a historically and culturally important journal in Mormonism. My article is entitled “The correct [domain] name of the Church: Technology, naming, and legitimacy in the Latter-day Saint tradition.” The title is a riff on Russell Nelson’s use of the phrase “The Correct Name of the Church” when leading a renewed emphasis on the full name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints early in his ministry as President of the same church. My addition of “domain” to the phrase also indicates my own focus in the study: To examine how, since 1996, official domain names have played a role in Latter-day Saint leaders’ use of particular names to reinforce the legitimacy of their church (either as a Christian religious body or as the true successor to the 1830 church founded by Joseph Smith Jr.).

I’m pleased to share that a study I contributed to—Gayservatives on Gab: LGBTQ+ Communities and Far Right Social Media—is now available (open-access!) through the Social Media + Society journal. Dr. Evan Brody is the lead author on the study, and we were lucky enough to have support from PhD student Mehroz Sajjad. Here’s the abstract for the study:

In the United States, LGBTQ+ individuals are often imagined as inherently politically progressive, but this assumption overlooks the experiences of self-identified LGBTQ+ conservatives. Likewise, although social media platforms are recognized as spaces of identity and community production for LGBTQ+ people generally, less work has considered how they provide a similar forum for “gayservatives.” In response, this article engages in a critical discourse analysis of LGBTQ+-oriented groups on the far right social media platform Gab. Results indicate that far right social media is utilized to connect with other politically similar LGBTQ+ individuals perceived to be absent in one’s offline community. Participants do so via discourses that both regulate and celebrate LGBTQ+ identities, particularly as it relates to hegemonic masculinity. These strategies generally reinforce, but at times reframe, stereotypical narratives about LGBTQ+ individuals. This study provides groundwork for more nuanced understandings of both LGBTQ+ conservatives and the ways power is socialized and embodied through discourses about sexual and gender identities.

I’m pleased to share the publication of a new chapter of an edited volume. The chapter in question is “I’m a French teacher, not a data scientist”: Culture and languages across my professions, and it’s part of a volume called Cultures and languages across the curriculum in higher education. According to the CLAC Consortium, Culture and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) is a:

a curricular framework that provides opportunities to develop and apply language and intercultural competence within all academic disciplines through the use of multilingual resources and the inclusion of multiple cultural perspectives.

I got word that a recent publication of mine was now published in an issue of Learning, Media, and Technology. It has actually been available online first for the past ten months, but since I haven’t been good about blogging about recent publications, I figured this was as good a chance as any to write a post about it. This piece is called “Lifting the Veil on TeachersPayTeachers.com: An Investigation of Educational Marketplace Offerings and Downloads” and is a collaboration with Catharyn Shelton, Matt Koehler, and Jeff Carpenter. Matt web scraped over four million pages associated with resources from the TpT platform, and we took a quantiative descriptive look at resource metadata, including subject areas, grade levels, resource types, Common Core State Standards, user ratings, and prices across those resources. We then interpreted our findings through José van Dijck’s writing on embedded values on digital platforms—this was my first real dive into van Dijck, and I’m particularly proud of that contribution. Here’s the abstract for more of a peek:

One of my earliest publications has been added to a research anthology without my knowledge or consent, since publisher owns copyright. Not necessarily opposed to end result, but still miffed about lack of control.