October 18, DEWG: Election Edition!
A great deal of the public conversation about the 2024 U.S. presidential election has revolved around memes and other forms of “extremely online” political speech (Childless cat ladies! Coconut trees! Couches!). How can digital ethnography help us better understand the origins, spread, and implications of this type of content? Join DEWG for a lively discussion about using digital ethnographic methods to analyze election-related speech and visual culture.
This event will be moderated by Caitlin Petre (Rutgers University), a member of the DEWG steering committee.
Dr. Brooklyne Gipson is an internet studies scholar and assistant professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University in the School of Communication and Information. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research areas include digital and social media environments, Black feminist digital/technology studies, and the intersection of race, gender, social media, and power. Her current research takes an intersectional approach to analyzing how anti-Black discourses manifest themselves in everyday discursive exchanges within Black social media spaces. Dr. Gipson received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. In 2021, she was awarded a fellowship from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy to support research on her forthcoming first book, Networked Misogynoir, which explores the iterative relationship between contempt for Black women, disinformation, cognitive bias, and algorithmic recommendation systems. Gipson is an editor of the forthcoming edited volume Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics and Labor. She is also an NYU Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies (CR+DS) affiliate.
Dr. Fenwick McKelvey is an Assistant Professor in Information and Communication Technology Policy in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. He is the author of Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed(University of Minnesota Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Award. He is co-author of The Permanent Campaign: New Media, New Politics (Peter Lang, 2012) with Greg Elmer and Ganaele Langlois. He has co-edited special issues on the Alt-Rights in Canada for the Canadian Journal of Communication and on Optimization for the Review of Communication. He holds a PhD in the joint program of Communication and Culture between York University and Ryerson University.
Dr. Francesca Tripodi is an Associate Professor at the School of Information and Library Science and a Principal Investigator at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill. She has twice testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, explaining to senators how relevance is gamed to drive ideologically based queries and spread conspiratorial logic. In addition to her research on search engines, Dr. Tripodi’s work has documented how cis-gender women who meet the threshold for inclusion on Wikipedia are nearly twice as likely to be considered non-notable subjects than their cis-male peers. In 2023, Dr. Tripodi received the Award for Impact and Excellence from the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington in recognition of her research on fostering an informed society. Her research has been covered in the United States by NPR, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, Slate as well as other prestigious international publications (e.g., BBC, the Financial Times, Sábado, Libération).
A great deal of the public conversation about the 2024 U.S. presidential election has revolved around memes and other forms of “extremely online” political speech (Childless cat ladies! Coconut trees! Couches!). How can digital ethnography help us better understand the origins, spread, and implications of this type of content? Join DEWG for a lively discussion about using digital ethnographic methods to analyze election-related speech and visual culture.
This event will be moderated by Caitlin Petre (Rutgers University), a member of the DEWG steering committee.
Dr. Brooklyne Gipson is an internet studies scholar and assistant professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University in the School of Communication and Information. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research areas include digital and social media environments, Black feminist digital/technology studies, and the intersection of race, gender, social media, and power. Her current research takes an intersectional approach to analyzing how anti-Black discourses manifest themselves in everyday discursive exchanges within Black social media spaces. Dr. Gipson received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. In 2021, she was awarded a fellowship from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy to support research on her forthcoming first book, Networked Misogynoir, which explores the iterative relationship between contempt for Black women, disinformation, cognitive bias, and algorithmic recommendation systems. Gipson is an editor of the forthcoming edited volume Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics and Labor. She is also an NYU Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies (CR+DS) affiliate.
Dr. Fenwick McKelvey is an Assistant Professor in Information and Communication Technology Policy in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. He is the author of Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed(University of Minnesota Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Award. He is co-author of The Permanent Campaign: New Media, New Politics (Peter Lang, 2012) with Greg Elmer and Ganaele Langlois. He has co-edited special issues on the Alt-Rights in Canada for the Canadian Journal of Communication and on Optimization for the Review of Communication. He holds a PhD in the joint program of Communication and Culture between York University and Ryerson University.
Dr. Francesca Tripodi is an Associate Professor at the School of Information and Library Science and a Principal Investigator at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill. She has twice testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, explaining to senators how relevance is gamed to drive ideologically based queries and spread conspiratorial logic. In addition to her research on search engines, Dr. Tripodi’s work has documented how cis-gender women who meet the threshold for inclusion on Wikipedia are nearly twice as likely to be considered non-notable subjects than their cis-male peers. In 2023, Dr. Tripodi received the Award for Impact and Excellence from the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington in recognition of her research on fostering an informed society. Her research has been covered in the United States by NPR, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, Slate as well as other prestigious international publications (e.g., BBC, the Financial Times, Sábado, Libération).