Kara Van Cleaf is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her academic interests include feminist and social theory, cultural studies of technology, digital labor, and the affective economies of motherhood. Her research on mommy blogs explores how, through both digital and affective labor, mommy bloggers bring the experience of motherhood into public and economic circulation as they refine and disperse data, fantasy, and affect. Mommy blogs provide a register of both the labor of motherhood and the labor of digital participation, blurring the line between production and consumption, labor and leisure, public and private, and nature and machine. Her research considers the political implications of this digital mother-machine attachment.

She currently works as an Instructional Technology Fellow at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY and is an adjunct professor at The Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY.