Elizabeth Fetterolf

Hi, I'm Elizabeth! 

I'm a PhD student in Communication at Stanford, supervised by Angèle Christin. I am interested broadly in how technology is affecting care work, and how discourses around the "crisis of care" are in turn shaping the way that these technologies are made, used, and marketed. 

My recent publications include studies of how workers communicate trustworthiness on Care.com, how workers use technology to manage pronoun sharing, and how young adult Alexa users navigate distrust through anthropomorphism. Currently, I am involved in the Social Science of Caregiving Research Program at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, working on a paper about the role of media in the feminist "sex wars" of the 1980s with Fred Turner, and conducting an ethnographic study of the "age tech" industry in the Bay Area. 

I received my MSc in Sociology from the University of Oxford in 2021, where I was supervised by Ekaterina Hertog. I then spent two years as a Pre-doctoral Research Assistant for the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England, where I worked with Mary Gray, Tarleton Gillespie, and Nancy Baym on topics such as content moderation, the future of work, and co-development of data systems alongside community-based organizations.