Alexis-Carlota Cochrane (she/they) is a PhD Candidate (ABD) and Sessional Instructor in the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
Updated: 02/11/2025 on
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Alexis-Carlota Cochrane (she/they) is a PhD Candidate (ABD) and Sessional Instructor in the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario where she also pursues a Graduate Diploma in Gender and Social Justice.
Alexis-Carlota investigates how AI-driven content moderation disproportionately targets vulnerable communities. Her research interests include Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV), Algorithmic (AI) Digital Harms, Critical Data Studies, Platform Studies, and Feminist and Queer Theory. Alexis-Carlota’s dissertation project explores how marginalized users appropriate digital platforms to resist and disrupt digital surveillance and censorship, particularly in relation to gender and sexual orientation.
Some of Alexis’s research can be found in Rivista di Digital Politics, Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH), and in an edited collection entitled “You’re Muted”: Performance, Precarity, and the Logic of Zoom, published by Bloomsbury. She co-authored the Canadian Women’s Foundation’s Challenging Gendered Digital Harm Research report, which presented the first nationally representative, disaggregated data on how people in Canada experience gendered digital harm.
Currently, Alexis-Carlota is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship. Her research affiliations include the Critical Data Studio, the DISCO Network, housed within the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, the Digital Feminist Network of Canada (DigFemNet), Northwestern University’s Centre for Latinx Digital Media, and the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. She supports the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities as a liaison.
Alexis-Carlota’s expertise has informed research and advocacy efforts with organizations such as the Canadian Women’s Foundation, Canadian Race Relations Foundation, Anti-Racism Directorate of Ontario, Apathy is Boring, and Mosaic Institute. She represented Canada at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, speaking on digital safety and gendered digital harms. In 2025, she was awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal for her work on Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence and gender justice in Canada.