Conferences & Symposia
Associate Professor Brooke Duffy delivered a lecture entitled “The Creator Economy's Labor Revolution” at SXSW 2025 in Austin, Texas.
Despite the astonishing growth of the creator economy, social media creators remain unrecognized as a distinct labor category. The panel explored the unique opportunities and challenges of platform-dependent creative work, including independent employment status, platform volatility, and the emerging risks of AI. Brooke and her colleagues also examined new forms of creator advocacy and solidarity-building—from boycotts to trade organizations to pay transparency initiatives. Brooke was one of three panelists, which was moderated by Ph.D. alum Colten Meisner, now assistant professor at North Carolina State University.
On April 2, 2025, Professor Lee Humphreys is participating in the symposium Emerging Tech Dialogues—Trust and Data: Tools for Our Changing World where she will present “What Are Good Data? Trust and Data in Qualitative Research.” The event is open to all Cornell-affiliated community members, but registration is required.
As a qualitative methods expert, Lee thinks a lot about what makes something data. The data of qualitative research are not always spreadsheets but scraps of papers, snapshots, field notes, recordings, and transcripts. How do we think about the trustworthiness of different kinds of data? What are “good data?” What are the best practices for ensuring our data and research are credible and reliable? Lee hopes attendees leave with a broader sense of what kinds of data exist and their importance for science and society more broadly.
Research Associate Sarah Gilbert participated in a panel entitled “Challenges to Understanding the Online Ecosystem Panel,” which was part of the Attention: Freedom, Interrupted! conference. The conference, hosted by the Media Ecosystem Observatory at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy and the Wilson Centre, was held in Montreal, Quebec.
The panel examined the ways that online spaces shape political participation, are subject to manipulation, amplify mis- and dis-information, and impact civic engagement. It focused on how scholars and civil society seek to understand the information ecosystem, why doing so is necessary to protect democratic societies, and how and why it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so.
Media Coverage
Grad student Sohinee Bera was quoted in a Cornell Chronicle article entitled “From Lab to Learning: Grad Students Bring Hands-On Science to NYS Classrooms.” The article examined the Graduate Student School Outreach Program (GRASSHOPR), a partnership between graduate students and local K–12 teachers. GRASSHOPR provides graduate students the opportunity to hone their teaching and communication skills by engaging students in STEM.
Research Associate Sarah Gilbert was quoted in the New York Times article, “’Will I Lose My Job?’ Federal Workers Flock to Reddit for Answers.”
