2025 Theses Doctoral

Conceptual and Empirical Examinations of Digital (Racialized) Socialization, Normativity, and Categorization

Frey, William R.

This three-paper dissertation examines the relationship between race and social media, focusing on three processes: socialization (Paper 1), normativity (Paper 2), and categorization (Paper 3). This research hopes to complicate past, current, and future scholarship on how race informs and structures what occurs on the internet and in social media contexts.

Paper 1, Digital White Racial Socialization: Social Media and the Case of Whiteness, outlines a theoretical and conceptual understanding of race as doings, and contributes a conceptual framework for considering the interrelationship between racial socialization processes and social media contexts.

Paper 2, Normative White Internet Practices, uses qualitative content analysis to study why white Reddit users applied to r/BlackPeopleTwitter in the year surrounding the murder of George Floyd, and ally qualifications they mentioned in their applications. It presents empirical evidence of normative white internet practices (e.g., self-improvement and self-absolution), arguing that these practices may lead to a persistence of online racism and the need for broader understandings of online racialized harm.

Paper 3, Positioning, Caveats, & Uncertainty: Examining (Racialized) Categorization on the Internet through an Extended Case Study with r/BlackPeopleTwitter, uses an extended case study and thematic analysis to investigate the constructed, multidimensional, and unstable actualities of (racial) self categorization and self-identification—problematizing the racial inference literature. This study finds that Reddit users engage race through processes of positioning, caveats, and uncertainty, and it hopes to shift how future research conceptualizes race in digital contexts moving forward.