-
Sage 5410
- fitzga2@rpi.edu
-
518-276-2083
- https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8291-2550
About
Andy Fitzgerald is an Assistant Professor in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research and teaching span critical cultural studies, media theory, user studies, and ethics. His research investigates how people and computational media co-produce everyday life and political subjectivation, with particular attention to the circulation of violence, authoritarian politics, and far-right mobilization. His work combines critical theory with qualitative and machine-assisted approaches to studying everyday technology use, including longitudinal mobile screen capture, interviews, and participant-guided analysis.
Fitzgerald is the founding director of the Mediatization Lab at RPI, which uses continuous screen capture ("Screenomics") paired with interviews and observation to study how people live with, negotiate, and shape mobile and computational media in everyday life. The lab is currently conducting a study of minority conservatives' mobile ecosystems and how they relate to political identity and sense-making. A future study will pilot a new approach to user studies combining longitudinal screen capture and video observation with reflexive, participant-guided collaborative analysis of the data—specifically examining practices of technological self-regulation and habits aimed at fostering awareness of computational media use.
His book manuscript, Mediatizing Terrorism: Social Media, Virtual Captivity, and the Reawakening of Fascism (under review at MIT Press), argues that platform media transformed public responses to Salafi-jihadist violence into a distributed, participatory condition he terms virtual captivity. Drawing connections between platform political economy and settler-colonial narratives of "savage war," the book explains how these transformations helped normalize authoritarian politics and fuel the resurgence of far-right movements across liberal democracies, laying the groundwork for events like the January 6 insurrection.
He is interested in advising doctoral students working on technology ethics, platform politics, digital political economy, critical user studies, and qualitative or computational approaches to studying everyday technology use.
Fitzgerald received his Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University in 2022. His work has appeared in Journal of Communication, Surveillance & Society, Communication Theory, Human-Computer Interaction, and Media Theory, among other venues.
B.A. in Politics, Bates College
Ph.D. in Communication, Stanford University
Research
Mediatized Violence and Far-Right Authoritarianism
My book project, Mediatizing Terrorism, examines how data-driven platform media reshaped public responses to Salafi-jihadist violence and contributed to the resurgence of far-right authoritarian movements across liberal democracies. Specifically, it examines the co-production of what I dub virtual captivity and its resonance with longstanding settler-colonial myths of "savage war" that have historically justified eliminationist violence. Related work has examined how drone warfare serves as mediatized propaganda, the political economy of computationally driven state violence, and participatory vigilantism and ritual punishment on social media platforms.
The Mediatization Lab
The Mediatization Lab uses continuous mobile screen capture ("Screenomics")—collecting images from participants' devices at short, regular intervals—paired with interviews and observation to study how people live with, negotiate, and shape computational media in everyday life. This approach, developed in earlier collaborative work through the Stanford Screenomics Lab, generates fine-grained, longitudinal records of everyday device use that surface habits and rituals typically invisible to self-report methods, from moment-to-moment platform switching to how users encounter and respond to unfolding news events.
Minority Conservatives' Mobile Media Ecosystems
In an ongoing study, the lab is examining the mobile ecosystems of minority conservatives—users whose racial, ethnic, or religious identities sit at odds with the dominant demographic assumptions of American conservatism—and how their platform use relates to political identity formation and sense-making. Combining screen-capture data with interviews, the study explores how these users navigate, curate, and make meaning within media environments that may affirm some parts of their identity while contesting others.
Technological Self-Regulation: Reflexive Methods for Studying Computational Media Use and Fostering Awareness
This forthcoming study pilots a new approach to user research that combines longitudinal screen capture and video observation with reflexive, participant-guided collaborative analysis of the data. Rather than treating participants solely as research subjects, the method invites them to review and interpret their own captured data alongside the research team—examining practices of technological self-regulation and the habits, strategies, and friction points involved in cultivating greater awareness of their own mobile and computational media use.
Publications
The following is a selection of recent publications in Scopus. Andrew Fitzgerald has 7 indexed publications in the subjects of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences.