Broadly, my research empirically examines ideologies, languages, and practices of racialized power—often in the form of ‘whiteness’. Although focusing on whiteness may seem like a normative recentering, it is instead an effort—as Toni Morrison describes— “to avert the critical gaze…from the described and imagined, to the describers and imaginers.” Specifically, my research falls along three interconnected lines, against the backdrop of social media and social algorithms: 1) how people become white through processes of racial categorization, socialization, identification, and performance; 2) how people participate in and attempt to resist interpersonal and institutional racism; and 3)examining the processes through which people seek forms of solidarity, community, and belonging

Selected Peer-Reviewed Publications

Cogburn, C. D., Allen, C. A., Frey, W. R., Filippone, P., Brown, B. R., & Witte, S. (2022). The Racial Projects of White Social Work Students. Advances in Social Work, 22(2), 574-604.

Frey, W. R., Ward., L. M., Weiss, A., & Cogburn, C. D. (2022). Digital White Racial Socialization: Social Media and the Case of Whiteness. Journal of Research on Adolescence, Special Issue:  “Oppression is as American as Apple Pie”: Learning About and Confronting Whiteness, Privilege, and Oppression, 32(3), 919-937.

Frey, W. R., Mann, N., Boling, A., Jordan, P., Lowe, K. N., & Witte, S. S. (2021). Uprooting (our) whiteness. Advances in Social Work, 21(2/3), 954–977.

Patton, D. U., Frey, W. R., McGregor, K. A., Lee, F. T., McKeown, K., & Moss, E. (2020, February). Contextual Analysis of Social Media: The Promise and Challenge of Eliciting Context in Social Media Posts with Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (pp. 337-342).

Patton, D. U., Frey, W. R., & Gaskell, M. (2019). Guns on social media: Complex interpretations of gun images posted by Chicago youth. Palgrave Communications.

Frey, W. R. (2018). Humanizing Digital Mental Health through Social Media: Centering Experiences of  Gang-Involved Youth Exposed to High Rates of Violence. Biomedical Informatics Insights.

Frey, W. R., Patton, D. U., Gaskell, M. B., & McGregor, K. A. (2020). Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion: Formerly Gang-Involved Youth as Domain Experts for Analyzing Unstructured Twitter Data. Social Science Computer Review, 38(1), 42–56.

Book Chapters

Frey, W. R. (2023). Everyday Whiteness and the Failure of the Private Life. In Social Work, White Supremacy, and Racial Justice: Reckoning with Our History, Interrogating Our Present, Reimagining Our Future. Oxford University Press.

Book Reviews

Frey, W. R. (2022). Edited by Sonia Tascón & Jim Ife, Disrupting Whiteness in Social Work. Journal of Social Work, 0(0), 1-3.

Frey, W. R. (2020). Robin DiAngelo, White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Journal of Social Work, 20(1), 123-125.

You can find my full publications list on Google Scholar & ResearchGate.