I am currently working on two primary research projects:
the co-creation of online celebrity via a case study of trans beauty vlogger Nikkie de Jager: this paper analyzes how de Jager and her audience negotiated their understandings of transgender identity. I draw on a sample of 13 videos on de Jager’s channel that address her identity between January 2020 and March 2022, and a corpus of more than 2,600 comments from these videos (200 randomly sampled comments from each video). These data demonstrate two key contexts in which commenters discuss de Jager’s transgender identity: to show their support for de Jager by sharing their own experiences in acts of reciprocal self-disclosure; and to defend de Jager against transphobic bad actors in the comments, thereby affirming her gender identity. This project demonstrates the co-creation of trans celebrity online between gender nonnormative content creators and their fans. De Jager’s skillful identity management leveraged the social media authenticity imperative to increase her celebrity status. This paper has been accepted to a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Celebrity Studies about trans celebrity, scheduled to publish in 2026.
the ecosystem of third-party intermediaries in influencer marketing: This project seeks to understand the ecosystem of intermediaries that have emerged as part of the growth and professionalization of the influencer marketing industry. Preliminary work on this topic includes semi-structured, in-depth interviews with ten current and former influencer talent managers to understand the process of relationship building between manager and talent, and the parts of this process that may reinforce existing social hierarchies along the lines of gender, race, and sexuality. Early thematic analysis suggests that the lack of regulation (such as regulatory bodies or clear legal rules delineating the function of specific roles) contributes to these inequalities, forcing talent managers to rely heavily on their personal and professional networks for information gathering around pay rates and other concerns—and networks that are largely inaccessible to those outside them. I plan to continue to expand this project into my dissertation—more updates to come!