Research and Publications

Peer-reviewed publications

Ale Ebrahim, B., Gohring, T., Fetterolf, E., Gray, M., (2023). Pronouns in the Workplace: Developing Sociotechnical Systems for Digitally Mediated Gender Expression. Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction, 7 (CSCW). 1-34. https://doi.org/10.1145/3579516

Fetterolf, E. (2022). It’s Crowded at the Bottom: Trust, Visibility, and Search Algorithms on Care.com. Journal of Digital Social Research, 4(1), 49–72. https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v4i1.98 

Under review

Fetterolf, E., Hertog, E. (under review). It's Not Her Fault: Trust through Anthropomorphism among Young Adult Alexa Users.

Other publications 

Teevan, J., Baym, N., Butler, J., Hecht, B., Jaffe, S., Nowak, K., Sellen, A., Yang, L., Ash, M., Awori, K., Bruch, M., Choudhury, P., Coleman, A., Counts, S., Cupala, S., Czerwinski, M., Doran, E., Fetterolf, E., Gonzalez Franco, M., … Wan, M. (2022). Microsoft New Future of Work Report 2022. Microsoft. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/microsoft-new-future-of-work-report-2022/ 

Fetterolf, E. (2021, June 17). Who Cares If It’s Human? Towards a Socialist Feminist Vision for Socially Reproductive AI. engagée, 10, 31–33. https://issuu.com/engagee/docs/issuee_engagee10 

Fetterolf, E., Walling, A. (2020, December 22). A Socialist Vision for Feminist Anti-Violence Organizing. Partisan Magazine. https://partisanmag.com/a-socialist-vision-for-feminist-anti-violence-organizing/ 

Current research projects

"Caring Surveillance and Surveillant Care in Amazon’s Alexa Together” 

Hochschild (2003) argued that individuals face a commodity frontier – the expansion of the market into intimate life as care is privatized. Amazon continues to pursue this frontier with Alexa Together, an eldercare system facilitated by the world’s most popular voice assistant. Unlike nursing or companion robots often referenced in discussions of care AI, Amazon does not purport to replace human caregivers; rather it allows individuals to “check in on loved ones with help from Alexa.” Feminist STS critiques of Alexa have focused on the VA as secretary (Lingel & Crawford, 2020), “smart wife” (Strengers & Kennedy, 2020), and domestic servant (Phan, 2019), but this new program evokes the home care worker, a heavily surveilled workforce comprised largely of low-wage women of color. I plan to explore Alexa Together’s relationship to both care and surveillance through a qualitative content analysis of its public-facing materials, including video advertisements, blog posts, FAQs, how-to videos, and customer support guides. Through this analysis, I will chart how these documents imagine the relationship between five key actors: the care recipient, the human caregiver, the “circle of support” (Amazon’s term for additional loved ones), Alexa, and Amazon itself. 

At the Social Media Collective, I'm working on and assisting with a variety of research projects including: pronoun-sharing at work as a sociotechnical communication process, the history of clickbait in public and academic discourse and its lessons for the future of content moderation, and how organizations can foster social capital and resilience heading into the future.