My Research
Peruse the products of hundreds of hours of labor (and fun, because I love doing media analysis about important topics in serious and/or nerdy media).
Topics analyzed include mental illness, trauma, race and the justice system.
Studies have shown that true crime podcasts reproduce the genre norms of true crime, but also raise new questions that challenge existing paradigms of victimization, policing, and justice. This study analyzes the podcast Fruitloops: Serial Killers of Color, which is hosted by a woman of color and a white woman. I conducted a narrative analysis of Fruitloops, focusing on how the show both reproduces and challenges the ideology of the true crime genre in the areas of race, bias, policing, incarceration, sentencing, and the death penalty.
This project analyzes how fanfiction both reflects and shapes popular understandings of trauma. It breaks down topics like whump, savior narratives, and fanfic's love affair with emotionally broken men, as well as post-traumatic growth, structural trauma, and childhood experiences of domestic abuse as a sociocultural identity. I also discuss what to do with all of that.
Currently, the project focuses on examples from fanfiction about the Marvel Cinnematic Universe.
The second phase of this project was published as part of WWU's 2022 Honors College Senior Projects collection, including an abstract and full text as of the second phase.
Serial crime, mass shootings, domestic violence incidents, suicides. All of these are often the topic of news stories. All are often tied to mental illness in those stories. This paper explores how news coverage of mental illness in the United States disproportionately connects it with violence and what the effects of this are on society and individuals. It will also discuss the ethics of covering mental illness as a reporter and what we can do to make coverage of mental illness less problematic.