CDSC at the NCA 2025:

CDSC members will be presenting at this years National Communication Association (NCA) Convention in Denver! You are warmly invited to join CDSC members during our talks and other scheduled events. Please come say hi!

Check out group members attending and what research they’ll be sharing:

Dyuti Jha: Dyuti will be presenting her paper titled “Mapping the Digital Life of Caste-Based Hate Speech” on Thursday, November 20th from 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM, discussing the processes of subreddit level moderation of caste-based hate speech in the absence of Reddit’s acknowledgement of Caste as a system of discrimination. The project seeks to understand how moderators in South Asian subreddits such as r/India and r/UnitedStatesofIndia identify caste based hate speech, how, if at all, they moderate it, whether the caste composition of the moderator teams for these subreddits influence the decision making on whether to or how to moderate such speech, and how they do so without any platform level guidelines. This project highlights a severely under researched area of caste in computing, particularly about how issues of identity bolsters or hinders inclusivity of a community.

Maddie Douglas: Maddie will be part of the Digital Rhetorics and Contemporary Media panel (Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division) on Friday, November 21st from 8:00 AM – 9:15 AM presenting a full paper titled “Strategic Ambiguity in the Modern Digital Age: Polysemy, Controversy, and AI Hype in the ‘Pause Giant AI Experiments’ Open Letter.” Maddie’s paper conducts a close reading of an “AI ethics” open letter that was spread shortly after GPT-4’s release, viewing it as a strategy to benefit AI investors and amplify hype. This reading makes a case for redefining “strategic ambiguity” from Leah Ceccarelli’s 1998 definition to include polysemy that achieves criticism (as well as praise) from audiences.

Hsuen-Chi (Hazel) Chiu: Hazel will be presenting her paper “AI Companions and the Illusion of Privacy: When Social Connection Meets Data Exposure” on Thursday, November 20th from 2:30 – 3:45 PM. She’ll discuss how users manage privacy when forming emotional relationships with AI companions. Drawing on interviews with 15 users of Replika and Character.AI, her study shows that people often treat these chatbots like trusted confidants while simultaneously worrying about how companies might use their data. Using Communication Privacy Management theory and the horizontal/vertical privacy framework, she highlights how users negotiate this tension between intimate disclosure and institutional surveillance. Her findings point to the need for more transparent, user-centered privacy design in emotionally supportive AI systems.

Srish Chatterjee: Srish will be at a day-long pre-conference called ‘Conspiratorial Economies,’ where they’ll present a full paper called “The Invisible Hand: Rhetorical Patterns in Conspiracy Theories on Technology’s Ubiquity.” Srish’s paper examines the rhetorical patterns of technological conspiracy theories and how they function as sophisticated folk epistemology that, while often factually inaccurate, articulate legitimate public anxieties about agency, surveillance, and corporate power in complex digital societies.