Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin (she/her) is a critical media and technology scholar whose academic research and community-based work is invested in understanding and addressing (in)equitable impact of media, technology, and information on systemically marginalized communities in the U.S.
Currently, she serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. Dr. Peterson-Salahuddin’s research focuses on the culturally specific ways marginalized communities, most often Black women, femmes, and queer folks, engage with mass and digital communications technologies to seek information, produce knowledge, and build community, and how the infrastructure of these technologies helps these communities to overcome or continue to replicate systemic barriers to equity.
Currently her research is focused on how the design of digital platforms, including search engines, social media platforms, and Generative AI chatbots, are shaping and reshaping Black women’s equitable access to critical political, social, and economic information. Dr. Peterson-Salahuddin is also currently working on a book project that examines how liberatory ideology gets reconstituted through popular media industries through the analytical lens of Black feminism. Her research has been published in several high-ranking peer-reviewed journals, including but not limited to Critical Studies in Media Communication, New Media and Society, Social Media + Society, Information, Communication & Society, Big Data & Society, and Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Her research has received scholarly recognition from the International Communications Association and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and her research has received funding support from the Russell Sage Foundation.
Dr. Peterson-Salahuddin received her MA and Ph.D. in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern University and her BA in Political Science and Media Studies from Vassar College.