Here, you'll find links to stuff I've written, from books peer-reviewed articles to reports and blog posts.
Book: Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century. (In press, University of Chicago Press—available for pre-order, shipping October 2024). Business as Usual reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games—what I call “sponsored economic education media.” These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to “sell America to Americans,” found their way into communities, classrooms, and workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of “free enterprise” under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a source of patriotic optimism, framed business management imperatives as economic principles, and conflated the privileges granted to corporations by the law with foundational political rights held by individuals. This rhetoric remains dominant—a harbinger of the power of disinformation that so besets us today. Business as Usual reveals the funding, production, and distribution that together entrenched a particular vision of corporate responsibility—and, in the process, shut out other understandings of value and common care.
Research article: Wicked Content. Communication, Culture & Critique (2019; Volume 12, Issue 4, pp. 435-454). This article argues that content that has been labeled as “propaganda” or “fake news” can be seen as wicked content: content that, by its circulation, signals the presence of wicked problems. As an implication of wicked content, this article argues for a sensitizing conceptualization of the term “propaganda” as an index of whether an observer considers the power exerted through media over matters of public relevance to be legitimate.
Research article: Producing Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose: How Libertarian Ideology Became Broadcasting Balance. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (2018; Volume 62, Issue 3, pp. 514-530). In the first weeks of 1980, Public Broadcasting Service affiliates across the United States aired Free to Choose, a television series featuring the economist Milton Friedman. ...[E]xecutive producer Robert Chitester’s success in bringing the series to air stemmed from two factors: first, he expressed social imaginaries that helped coordinate funding relationships with underwriters; and second, he drew on his institutional knowledge of public television production to navigate zones of regulatory ambiguity without running afoul of broadcast rules and regulations.
Blogpost essay: Grappling with the Weirdness of Advertising. Points (June 21, 2017). The question of what protections ads themselves deserve, and to what degree people deserve to be protected from ads, is ripe for reconsideration.
Report: Lexicon of Lies: Terms for Problematic Information. (August 9, 2017). Data & Society Research Institute. The words we choose to describe media manipulation can lead to assumptions about how information spreads, who spreads it, and who receives it. These assumptions can shape what kinds of interventions or solutions seem desirable, appropriate, or even possible.
Blogpost essay: What's Propaganda Got to Do with It? Points (January 5, 2017). Calling out news — whether real or fake — as propaganda expresses anxieties over media power, but is it helping us a get a grip on the media landscape?
Blogpost essay: Imagining the Sharing Economy. Points (November 21, 2016). Economies are objects of imagination: they emerge from the choices we make about how to measure them, and the stories we tell about what those numbers mean.
Blogpost essay: Social Good in the Sharing Economy. The Knight Foundation (October 19, 2016). Talk about economies is a way of working out moral visions for the present and the future. Will our reality be one where wealth is distributed broadly, or one where disproportionate prosperity is limited to a fortunate few?
Thinkpiece: Meaning and Persuasion: The Personal Computer and Economic Education. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (July-Sept 2016). As the personal computer became associated with business identities in the final decades of the 20th century, software became an increasingly viable site for reflecting, maintaining, and shaping cultural understandings of business and economics.
Research article: Fun and Facts about American Business: Economic Education and Business Propaganda in an Early Cold War Cartoon Series. Enterprise and Society (September 2015, lead article). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, millions of theatergoers, students, and industrial workers saw one or more animated short films, shot in Technicolor and running eight to nine minutes, that were designed to build public support for the principles and practices of free enterprise (example of the films here).