FIELDS OF SCHOLARSHIP

Rhetoric History & Theory (primary) | Literary Theory and Discourse Analysis (secondary) | Experimental Digital Media (XDM) with a focus on Computational Rhetoric

Integrated Thesis

Ethical Heuristics in AI Human-Centered Design (HCD), Privacy in Women’s Health, & Surveillance in the Digital Age Guiding Responsible Innovation Across Health, Privacy, and Public Safety in AI Technologies

My research focuses on the implications of algorithmic rhetoric and its impact on humanity, with a focus on the critical need for oversight in AI and human data to minimize harm. It sits at the intersections of computational rhetoric and digital surveillance, examining how these systems shape societal narratives and power dynamics. As part of my scholarship, I coined two terms: algorithmic ethopoeia and ethotic heuristics.

Algorithmic ethopoeia is “the mathematizing of human data for the purpose of digital representation and human characterization, through the processes of sorting and targeting, with subsequent subjugation to algorithmic procedures and decision-making protocols.”

“Ethotic heuristics serve as a critical meta-framework designed to counteract the misrepresentation and dehumanization embedded in technological systems. This approach emphasizes the moral obligation of designers and policymakers to ensure that AI systems are ethical, equitable, and inclusive. By addressing systemic biases in data collection, modeling, and deployment, ethotic heuristics prioritize dignity, agency, and diversity—championing the creation of technologies that empower rather than exploit. This is particularly urgent in a post-Roe era, where the intersection of AI, privacy, and women’s health demands systems that honor transparency, accountability, and justice, actively dismantling mechanisms of surveillance and marginalization.”

Journal Articles (integrated thesis essays)

Conversations Towards Practiced AI – HCI Heuristics (Springer)

Abstact: Artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most critical features of our techno culture, and by extension, a key element in many user-facing technologies. However, User Interface (UI) and Experience Designers (XD) lack the necessary understanding of AI, as well as the variances of its application but most importantly, they lack guiding principles for the day-to-day activities of design. Through the prism of existing Design Thinking framework, a knowledge pathway that intersects with AI technology, in pursuit of practical design heuristics, is necessary. Such heuristics must enable Designers to respond to the call for growing and emergent regulations around AI; they must enable the continued adherence of human centred design, privileging human over machine, and they must empower Designers in AI design conversations. Given these circumstances, there is also a need for both research and education that seeks to investigate all the ways in which AI influences human computer interaction (HCI) and design, broadly. This paper takes a step towards acknowledging the lack of practiced AI-HCI knowledge frameworks that can guide Designers through the Design Thinking phases when designing technologies that deploy AI with user facing technologies, in varying contexts and domains. Further, the growing levels of concerns around AI, often with detrimental effects and negative human outcomes, make the matter mission critical and forces the acknowledgment that we need guidance, as appendages to existing Design Thinking frameworks and which can keep pace with the rapid rates of technological advances.

Sex after Technology: The Rhetoric of Health Monitoring Apps and the Reversal of Roe v. Wade (Rhetoric Society Quarterly)

The convergence of artificial intelligence technologies with the growth of Christo-fascist movements in the United States presents an alarming threat to women’s health, especially considering known privacy violations by the major players—all in the shadow of the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. These violations are ethotic; that is, they betray information that has been mined algorithmically to construct “user models,” bits and pieces of which are sold or otherwise circulated without true “user” consent or cooperation. Such models are best understood as algorithmic ethopoeia, mathematized representations of individuals charted as matrices of commodified categories for commercial trafficking, but also for politicians and law enforcement. Taking inspiration from abolitionist tools for resisting intersectional racism, and incorporating data feminism, we offer six categories of design heuristics to respect and maintain ethopoeic integrity, especially in the domain of women’s health in a post-Roe technological landscape, using a fundamental rhetorical concept to serve designers, as well as critics and activists.

Beyond Security: Examining the Problematic Rhetoric of Surveillance Technology in Public Safety – A Critical Discourse Analysis

This article offers an applied methodological framework, critical discourse analysis (CDA), and an accompanying proposed set of contextually situated heuristics to counter the rhetoric in the discourse surrounding surveillance technologies. Surveillance rhetoric is depicted in digitally borne artifacts such as Terms of Agreements, law enforcement public service messages, and general website content. We focus on how these “textual productions” serve as vehicles of surveillance rhetoric, aimed at persuading readers to increase their trust in surveillance technology tools, platforms, and systems. Often, the wider goal of this rhetoric is framed as ‘security and public safety.’ We aim to contribute to the conversation and provide heuristic guidance for critical readers, including scholars, policymakers, and citizens, to reframe the narrative of security and increase citizen agency with a means to decode such rhetoric. Our offer of heuristics can further empower stakeholders to recognize, critically evaluate, and challenge the justifications presented for surveillance practices.

Research Assitanceship

Teaching & TA’ships