Alexis Fabricius

My research examines the ethical, social, and philosophical implications of digital technologies, AI, and data in psychology across research, clinical practice, and teaching. I am particularly interested in how data-intensive and AI-enabled technologies pose unique (and sometimes overlooked) ethical challenges, including the privacy, environmental, and labour impacts of large-scale data practices; emerging privacy risks associated with AI scribes and cloud-based clinical management systems; and the effects of generative AI on undergraduate psychology education.

A central strand of my work re-imagines what data is, foregrounding its material and relational dimensions as a way of pushing back against the uncritical influence of Big Tech in psychological knowledge production and expanding ethical thinking beyond narrowly prescriptive frameworks. I am also interested in the entanglements between health, healthcare, and digital technologies (e.g., AI-based clinical decision support systems, menstrual tracking apps, data linking), and in understanding how humans and technologies come together to shape care, expertise, and trust in healthcare settings.

Although my work is theoretically driven, it is always applied, focusing on real-world issues and experiences and often offering recommendations or solutions. My scholarship is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on science and technology studies (STS), feminist technoscience, critical data studies, AI ethics, and philosophy, among other fields. While I am critical of Big Tech, my work also recognizes the meaningful benefits digital technologies can offer and seeks to support psychologists in engaging these technologies in socially responsible, justice-oriented, and ethical ways, with careful attention to their uneven impacts.

• BA Hons - York University - History
• MA - University of Toronto - History
• BA Hons - York University - Psychology
• MA - University of Guelph - Applied Social Psychology
• PhD - University of Guelph - Applied Social Psychology

A complete list of my publications can be found on my Google Scholar profile.

• Fabricius, A., O'Doherty, K., & Yen, J. (2025). Data ethics and the Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists. Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/cap0000440
• O’Doherty, K. C., Fairley, C., Badulescu, D., & Fabricius, A. (2024). Analyzing discourse for implicit ontologies. Qualitative Psychology, 11(2), 294–314. https://doi.org/10.1037/qup0000293
• Beijbom, M., Fabricius, A., & O’Doherty, K. C. (2023). Women’s health magazines and postfeminist healthism: A critical discourse analysis. Feminism & Psychology, 33(4), 604–621. https://doi.org/10.1177/09593535231169823
• Fabricius, A., Rutherford, A., & O’Doherty, K. C. (2022). Navigating violence and risk: A critical discourse analysis of blind women's portrayals of self-protective measures. Feminism & Psychology, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/09593535221080352
• Fabricius, A., D’Souza, A., Amodio, V., Colantonio, A., & Mollayeva, T. (2020). Women’s gendered experiences of traumatic brain injury. Qualitative Health Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732319900163

• PSYC*3000 - Historical and Critical Perspectives on Psychology
• PSYC*3300 - Psychology of Gender
• PSYC*6840 - Program Evaluation

My research speaks to psychologists, educators, and policymakers navigating the ethical adoption of digital technologies. I have a particular interest in supporting ethical decision-making around privacy, data governance, and AI use in research, clinical practice, and education.

I welcome undergraduate and graduate students interested in exploring digital technologies from a critical and/or ethical perspective and who are open to employing qualitative methods, research-creation or theoretical approaches (feminist, posthuman, new materialist, critical disabilities studies, post-colonial, etc.).

I am especially well suited to supervising projects that are conceptual, qualitative, or theoretically driven, and that engage with the issues I describe above.