Research
I’m interested in communities and publics in digital media. How do we come together through the media we use? How do we build our own networks (infrastructures, relationships) and how do these influence our experience of activism, politics, and governance?
Here’s my CV
Things I’ve done:
Postdoctoral Research Project: “Institutionalizing Peer Production and Digital Activism”
I am interested in the interplay between culture, technology, and political action. Generally, my work focuses on the social and political significance of alternative, non-commercial development of internet technologies and the communities and publics that form. In particular, I explore community innovation, participation in digital media politics, and digital advocacy.
I propose that these emerging forms of collaboration create unique types of organizational and social structures that may challenge existing institutions that deliver and regulate telecommunications, either by providing policy critiques or by helping alternative institutions to develop. My recent work on Net Neutrality and digital advocacy addresses the flow of ideas between activists and advocates and policy makers.
I’ve recently been thinking about participation as it’s connected with mobile internet technologies. How do the affordances of time and space sensitive internet technology configure opportunities to participate in social movements, engage with government, and enact politics?
Keywords
Technology
culture
Politics
PhD Thesis: “Co-productions of Technology, Culture and Policy in the North American Community Wireless Networking Movement”
Abstract:
This thesis investigates the visions and realities of community WiFi’s social and political impact, examining how communication technology and social forms are co-produced and providing a communication studies perspective on the transformation of social visions of technology into technological, social, and policy realities. By following the development of local WiFi projects and the emergence of broader policy-oriented mobilizations, it assesses the real outcomes of socially and politically progressive visions about information and communication technologies (ICTs). The visions of advocates and developers suggest that community WiFi projects can inspire greater local democratic engagement, while the realities suggest a more subtle bridging of influence from community WiFi actors into policy development spheres. The thesis describes local WiFi networks in Montreal and Fredericton, NB, and the North American Community Wireless Networking (CWN) movement as it has unfolded between 2004 and 2007, arguing that its democratic visions of technology and their institutional realities have been integral to the politicization of computing technology over the last four decades. Throughout the thesis, WiFi radio technology, a means of networking computers and connecting them to the internet by using unlicensed radio spectrum, acts as an example of how a technology’s material form is co-produced along with its symbolic social and political significance.
Thesis Chapters:
Chapter One: Lit Review & Theory
Chapter Two: Computerization Movements