I study what computing technologies make possible, for whom, and at whose expense. I do so by examining how communities appropriate platform technologies to support forms of labor and social organization that these systems were not originally designed to accommodate. In parallel, I analyse how institutional actors, including platform corporations and AI developers, deploy discourse to naturalize particular technological trajectories while rendering alternative sociotechnical arrangements illegible, and how the epistemological conditions of computing research itself reproduce these exclusions while advocating for more participatory, community-grounded intervention.

Appropriation, Infrastructuring, and Design

My research investigates how users appropriate digital platforms, particularly highlighting the labour-intensive nature of this process. Appropriation is the situated, ongoing process by which users repurpose technologies within their contexts to make them their own (Stevens, et al., 2009). It is also closely tied to infrastructuring, or the intentional work of building and maintaining systems through appropriation (Star, 1999; Plantin et al., 2019). I have investigated appropriation practices across a range of contexts, including early work on how poets appropriate Instagram's visual format to publish and share textual content (De & Lu, 2024), activist appropriation of Instagram (De & Cotter, 2025), small businesses' use of WhatsApp for commercial purposes (De, 2025), fat liberationists' use of social media platforms as information-seeking hubs (Jonas et al., 2024; Cotter et al., 2025), and users' and creators' viewing, creation, presentation, and sharing of spiritual and religious content (Cotter et al., 2024; De et al., 2025; Kanthawala et al., 2023).

Through these, my work is among the first to empirically show that as platforms grow more complex, they embed colonial undertones of standardization, privileging Eurocentric notions of innovation. I term this process coercive professionalization, where Eurocentric ideas about what it means to use a platform effectively and professionally can be detrimental to existing forms of appropriation. My findings build a case for designs prioritizing customizability within appropriation, preserving local and community-specific appropriations rather than enforcing rigid, top-down updates that disrupt established workflows and social interactions. This work is being extended through partnerships with Lips.Social, an alternative social media platform, with whom my team and I are collaborating to speculate and prototype scalable alternative platforms with community-oriented governance and decision-making structures.

Discourse, Power, and the Construction of Technological Futures

A second strand examines how institutional actors construct discursive frameworks that position technological innovation as inevitable, beneficial, or necessary, thereby foreclosing meaningful deliberation about alternatives. This inquiry emerged from an empirical observation: the communities we studied frequently drew upon corporate and media discourse to develop intuitive, folk theories about platforms they were already using, with significant consequences for how they understood their own agency and rights within these systems. To account for the communicative strategies through which platforms manage user interpretations of change, we developed the concept of changecraft, a structured discursive practice that frames algorithmic and policy transformations in ways that serve institutional interests, naturalize platform authority, and circumscribe users' sense of possible response (De & Cotter, 2026). Earlier work in this strand identified the broader ideological scaffolding of platform discourse, including the mobilization of utopian imaginaries (Proferes et al., 2025) and appeals to "magic" (Cotter et al., 2024), through which corporations render AI and platform technologies as inherently progressive and socially beneficial, as well as the ways in which AI systems encode and reproduce forms of religious authority through both their design and communicative strategies (Davis et al., 2025).

My ongoing work on generative AI safety discourse extends this analysis by examining how institutions mobilize a shifting repertoire of metaphors depicting existential risk, mundane utility, and appeals to responsible self-regulation, to stabilize particular interpretations of AI's risks and benefits (De et al., 2026). As future work, I aim to develop discursive toolkits that render these patterns visible, enabling more critical engagement with how claims about safety are constructed and mobilized in practice.

Epistemology, Method, and the Politics of Research Infrastructure

The third strand takes as its object the institutional conditions that determine what counts as legitimate knowledge in computing research. I argue that the field's gatekeeping mechanisms, including IRB frameworks, recruitment norms, and publication standards, are not neutral but epistemically consequential, systematically reproducing the same exclusions that critical computing scholarship seeks to address. At a moment when AI development is becoming increasingly concentrated and top-down, the recovery and centering of local, situated, and community-held knowledge becomes an urgent critical project. I examine how IRB structures and publication norms, designed primarily for Western academic contexts, are ill-equipped to support non-Western, community-grounded research methodologies, foreclosing the forms of knowledge most consequential for critical computing (De et al., 2025). A related line of work extends this into practice, offering frameworks for integrating lived experience into AI system design as a constitutive input rather than a post-hoc validation mechanism (Gautam et al., 2025).

Future Research Agenda

My research is organized around a central question: how power is produced, stabilized, and potentially reconfigured in sociotechnical systems. I hope to extend this agenda through two interconnected directions: (1) imagining alternative, more community-centered technologies, and (2) critically examining discourse and representation in computational systems.

The first direction emerges from my ongoing collaboration with Lips.Social. Drawing on interviews and participatory workshops currently in a pilot phase, this project examines user needs and barriers within community-based governance systems, foregrounding questions of accessibility, sustained user agency, and scalability models that privilege depth of engagement over quantitative growth metrics. This work aims to develop transferable frameworks, and theories for bottom-up, community-driven design, with implications for institutional design, policy, and collective technological stewardship.

The second direction extends my discourse-analytic research on corporate and public narratives surrounding AI. Building on the fact that discourses manifest as recurring ideological frames and strategic silences, I aim to develop evidence-based governance frameworks that equip regulators, civil society actors, and industry practitioners with tools for more transparent, accountable, and inclusive AI communication, while also engaging broader questions of how narratives of innovation influence regulatory design and public trust in computational systems.