I analyze how racism and sound are intertwined in our modern world and manifest in the cultural industries.
My research fuses the sociology of race, organizations, and cultural production with the fields of sound studies, American/ethnic studies, and the history of radio and broadcasting. My scholarship has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.
Book project on audiobook narrators in the digital age (2024-present)
The audiobook industry is booming. In 2010, audiobook sales comprised less than 2% of total book sales. By 2020, “digital audiobooks alone contributed 8.3% of total trade revenue in the book industry” (Snelling 2021: 643). All this growth might appear to be an unmitigated good for audiobook narrators, who are the most visible (or perhaps more suitably, audible) workers that make the adaptations from book manuscripts to their audio formats possible. If this growth were the only industry shift, audio book narrators would seem to be the ones best positioned to benefit from this market expansion. However, two more recent industry shifts have posed threats to the stability of their profession.
First is the rise of AI technology and its use in audio adaptations. The use of AI narration has been proposed as an effective cost-saving option for publishing companies, particularly for lower budget books. The second change is an increased use of celebrity actors with name recognition in voicing audiobooks. Aligned with the insight that vocal recognition leads listeners to rate their listening experience as more pleasant (Vinney and Vinney 2017), book authors and publishers seek out celebrity voices to boost interest in their titles.
How are less privileged voice workers affected by these changes, as technological shifts coincide with celebrity inroads into the audiobook job market? My current project examines the effects of these two intersecting shifts on rank-and-file audiobook narrators.
Book project on the racialization of voice in public radio (2017-2025)
For my dissertation project, Racialized airwaves in the public radio industry, I conducted 83 original interviews with people of color working in American public radio, and I analyzed the archives of public radio housed in Washington, D.C. Drawing on these data sources, I argue that American public radio managers cater to an assumed white, well-educated set of public radio donors by manipulating racialized notions of whose voices are “warm” and “authoritative.” Although managers defend these practices as necessary to create a “sustainable financial future,” these same factors limit the creative freedoms of nonwhite public radio workers and tend to alienate working class listeners of color. The project was a co-winner of the 2023 ASA Dissertation Award. Details here. This project has been developed into the book, Listeners Like Who?, published September 2025 with Princeton University Press.
Ongoing research theme: Sound as a tool for social change
While my work does look at the ways racism entrenches how we (mis)hear one another, I also examine how sound—both in terms of audio production and listening practices— can act as a tool for social change. I have a co-written article with Neroli Price at Radio Journal, entitled “Radio drama as a tool for activism in South Africa: The case of Plague in the Time of King Kapital and Queen Corona.” In it, we conduct a close listening of a Covid-19 era radio drama in South Africa. In linking the show to its production and reception, we show how sound may be used as a tool for political conscientization, particularly in times of crisis. My article in the Journal for Radio and Audio Media (available here) highlights how academics and archivists can work together to make sound archives more accessible research materials.
Ongoing research theme: How racial inequalities get reproduced through everyday processes
I am committed to uncovering how racism operates within everyday cultural processes. In addition to my research on how white racialized organizations are formed through fieldwide institutional pressures, I have a stream of collaborative work that uncovers racism in knowledge production and economic life. My co-written Oxford Bibliography entry on Knowledge with prabhdeep singh kehal and Dr. Michael Kennedy foregrounds how dominant knowledges are mediated through the structures of the color line, and how situated knowledges from marginalized communities often offers transformative insights for dismantling these structures. My co-written article with Dr. Daniel Hirschman, “Toward an Economic Sociology of Race”, in the Socio Economic Review charts an agenda for taking the study of race seriously within economic sociology and in the life of markets.