Professional Title: Assistant Professor of Communication and Media
Email: cynthiamcleod@ucmerced.edu
Office: ACS 262
Education:
PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara, Communication
MSc, University College London, Digital Anthropology
BSc, Howard University, Psychology
Research Interest:
Digital Communication
Language and Interaction
Digital Media and Inline Environments
Black Identity to Community and Place
Bio:
Dr. Cynthia McLeod is an interdisciplinary, digital communication scholar who explores how people use language and interaction to shape their social realities on digital media and online environments. She is most drawn to questions that relate Black identity to community and place, and her research sits within the broader effort in the social sciences and humanities to define community, identify its boundaries, and note the acts that sustain communities over time.
She often turns her attention to Black populations, or other historically oppressed communities, as exemplars for the study of community formation and community maintenance given their experience with maintaining community in unsettled and tumultuous environments (e.g., plantations).
A few questions capture her core interests:
(1) How does identity affect online community interaction?
(2) How do digital technologies affect community formation?
(3) What acts have Black communities undertaken to produce communal space?
These questions get to the heart of debates regarding the “loss of community,” that many believe plagues the digital age as social relationships are played out and maintained via digital technologies.
Representative Papers:
McLeod, C.N. (2025) Black Twitter as "Master" social architects: Maintaining online community boundaries through the production of time and place. Social Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251374500
McLeod. C.N., Gonzales, A., King, J., Hui, J., Israni, A. (2024). What is community?: Informing the design of a community building platform for low-income Black and Latino residents. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 1-10.
Lane, D., Moxley, S., & McLeod, C.N. (2023). The group roots of social media politics: Social sorting predicts perceptions of and engagement in politics on social media. Communication Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502231161400
Hui, J., King, J., McLeod, C.N, & Gonzales, A. (2023). High risk, high reward: Social networking online in under-resourced communities. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581084
Classes Taught:
COMM 017/GASP 004 Intro to Media and Performance Studies
COMM 151 Social Media
COMM 003 Interpersonal Communication
