Research and CV
My research sits where media industry studies, platform governance, and feminist media studies meet. I ask how ownership, technology, and regulation together decide what media get made and who gets to make them. Most of my fieldwork is in Turkey, and I work comparatively with material from Israel and the United States. I use qualitative methods, mostly long interviews and digital ethnography, along with discourse analysis and political economy.
Creator industries and platform regulation
I treat the creator economy as a media industry rather than a collection of individuals. My dissertation examined how platform ownership, algorithmic infrastructure, and state regulation converge in Turkey, where creators making feminist, queer, and leftist work operate under both algorithmic suppression and the threat of prosecution. A related strand follows platform liability law, which pushes global companies into local compliance under threat of throttled bandwidth and reshapes what they are willing to monetize. I read censorship in that setting as an industrial process, with regulatory risk absorbed into the architecture of revenue.
Artificial intelligence and the media industries
My book project asks what becomes of creative labor once brands can generate influencers instead of hiring them, and what it means for a company to own a spokesperson outright. Alongside it, I am working with collaborators on how well multimodal AI systems actually read political stance in creator content. Benchmarked against expert coding, they identify commercially standardized material reliably and miss coded political speech.
Gender, visibility, and the cost of being seen
Across all of this I keep returning to the question of who pays for being visible. I have written on networked misogyny in Turkey, which does its disciplinary work in exactly the places law and platform moderation leave unattended, on the performance of body positivity on Instagram, and, with colleagues at UMass Amherst, on how adolescents read gender in advertising and on YouTube.
Curriculum VitaeDownload
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