Each year a small portion of AoIR conference fees go toward several Kelly Quinn Travel Scholarships for junior scholars to attend the conference. We want to recognize our scholarship recipients and share with you a little bit about them and their research interests.
Who are you?
I am Poulami Seal, a 3rd-year PhD student in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University.
Where are you from?
I am originally from India, and now live in Atlanta as a PhD student in the U.S. This transnational journey shapes how I think about questions of voice, visibility, and power in digital spaces.
What is your current area of study?
My work investigates how class, caste, and gender shape content creation in the Global South. I am especially interested to understand manifestation stigmatized yet strategic digital practices that disrupt dominant ideas of taste, visibility, and authenticity.
Describe the research you will present at AoIR2025.
At AoIR 2025, I will present two papers. My solo-authored project, “Cringe Aesthetics and Digital Casteism: Platform Economies and the Precarious Labor of Rural Content Creators in India,” examines how algorithmic bias and taste hierarchies marginalize rural creators, drawing on an analysis of 5,000+ comments on the most popular “cringe” videos. My co-authored paper, “Cultural Narratives and Economic Independence: The Rise of Rural Women Vloggers in India,” explores how vlogging becomes a form of cultural labor and economic agency for rural women. Together, these papers highlight how digital participation is both a site of creativity and a negotiation with structural inequality.
Have you presented at AoIR in the past? If so, what was your experience? If #AoIR2025 in Niterói is your first AoIR conference, what made you choose this conference? What do you expect from it?
This will be my first time presenting at AoIR. I chose this conference because of its reputation as a vibrant and interdisciplinary community for internet research. I expect to immerse myself in an environment filled with scholars whose work resonates closely with my own interests, to engage in meaningful conversations, and—most importantly—to gain critical feedback that will help me refine and strengthen my research.
