My collaborator, Dr. Melissa Villa-Nicholas, and I are proud to announce that our new article, "Designing the "good citizen" through Latina identity in USCIS's virtual assistant "Emma", is now published in the online issue of Feminist Media Studies! This paper marks the first of three projects interrogating various cultural, political, and social aspects of Latina AI. Stay tuned for updates on this research! *You can learn more about Dr. Melissa Villa-Nicholas's pioneering research on Latinx information histories and practices here!

Abstract:
​Virtual assistants are increasingly integrated as “user-friendly” interfaces for e-government services. This research investigates the case study of the virtual assistant, “Emma,” that is integrated into the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website. We conduct an interface analysis of Emma, along with the USCIS website, and related promotional materials, to explore the cultural affordances of Latina identity as a strategic design for this virtual assistant. We argue that the Emma interface makes normative claims about citizenship and inclusion in an attempt to “hail” Latinx users as ideal citizens. We find that the “ideal” citizen is defined through the Emma interface as an assimilated citizen-consumer that engages with digital technologies in ways that produce them as informationally “legible” to the state.

I'm so excited to announce that I have a new article out with co-author (and UA SLIS alum) Kelsea Whaley, that discusses emoji skin-tone modifers and whiteness.  This project was a long time in the making, so it's a delight to finally see it out in final form! Check out the article, "Technically white: Emoji skin-tone modifers as American technoculture," in the July 2019 issue of First Monday!

Abstract:
The inclusion of skin-tone modifiers into the standard emoji set marked a shift from the default white racialization of emoji towards explicit attempts to expand racial representation in the human emoji characters. This study explores the racial logics of emoji as culturally-situated artifacts that rely on linked understandings of race and technology. We conduct an interface analysis of emoji skin-tone modifiers, coupled with user discourse analysis, to explore the design and user interpretations of skin-tone modifiers. Our findings suggest that though the skin-tone modifiers were introduced as an intervention into the lack of racial representation in emoji, they continue to technically center whiteness in the emoji set as an extension of American technoculture.