Education
PhD in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University (2022-present)
BA Honours in Sociology, University of Cape Town (2020)
Bachelor of Social Sciences in Sociology, Politics, and French Language and Literature, University of Cape Town (2017-2019)
Research Interests
(I’m a promiscuous reader.)
Art Economy, Data Governance, Film & Photography, Health & Medicine, Law, Sex & Sexuality, and Science & Technology Studies
Senior Thesis
Supervised by Prof. Amrita Pande, my senior thesis, titled “Software with a smile: Theorising the Affective Labour of Apple’s Virtual Assistant Siri Under Surveillance Capitalism”, explored how Apple’s Siri is gendered and how we might analyse the virtual assistant software’s gendered affective labour in the context of the developing matrix of power which Shoshana Zuboff terms surveillance capitalism.
Conference Presentations
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship South African Regional Conference (25-26 September, 2020)
[virtual due to COVID-19], presenter, “Software with a smile: Theorising the affective labour of
Apple’s virtual assistant Siri under surveillance capitalism”
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Summer Research Training Program Conference (8 July,
2019) [University of Chicago, USA], presenter, “'Siri, are you spying on me?’ Locating virtual assistant software
in surveillance capitalism”
Upcoming presentations:
“No body’s data: historicizing the right to privacy in the converging realms of reproductive health and digital technologies”, Reproductive Justice Graduate Student Conference (31 March, 2023) [New Haven, USA]
“Opening the Black Box: Explaining Automated Software Systems”, Law and Society Annual Meeting (1-4 June, 2023) [San Juan, Puerto Rico]
Selected Awards
Max Price and Deborah Posel Honours Scholarship, University of Cape Town (2020)
National Research Foundation Honours Innovation Scholarship (2020)
Honours Merit Scholarship, University of Cape Town (2020)
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, University of Cape Town (2019-2020)