Postdoctoral Fellow Projects

DCSL hosts exceptional early-career scholars from various disciplines, including the social sciences, humanities, law, computer science, and engineering. Our postdocs engage in research on a wide range of priority issues. These notably include the relationship between data and social movements; the digitization of public goods like libraries; public-private partnerships involving data sharing; the ethics of technological design; the roots, spread, and effects of mis/disinformation; and the history of digital rights advocacy.

Current Projects

Music Fandom after #MeToo

Music Fandom after #MeToo (working title) explores the implications of the MeToo movement on 10 different fandoms across Hip-Hop and Alternative Rock. In interviewing 50+ fans of various acts that had been accused of sexual misconduct, this project explores the way in which audiences use social media to discuss, process and police allegations of abuse, and how race, music genre, media intervention and victim respectability politics all complicate the way that allegations are understood, debated and/or forgiven in the public sphere. (2024-2025)

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Politics of platforms and policy implications of the platform economy in India

This project studies the politics of gig work through women gig workers’ experiences using collaborative methodologies. The project is focused on digital workers, and particularly women workers in India, as they develop new toolkits for organizing and collectivizing, and fight to secure their labor rights in the face of patriarchal retrenchment worldwide. The aim of the project is to theorize the broader landscape of platform capitalism in India, focusing on its entanglements with politics, democracy, and civil society. (2024-2025)

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Previous projects

Volunteering the Valley: Designing for the Common Good in the San Francisco Bay Area

This book project follows a group of civic technologists in the Bay Area as they try to design digital technologies for the common good. The book explores how technologists involved with various Tech for Good initiatives not only try to embed political values into digital technologies, but simultaneously grapple with their disillusionment with their careers in the high-tech industry and try to recapture the initial excitement, pride, and sense they are ‘saving the world’ that they felt when they first began in tech. Drawing these processes out in all their contradictory detail, the book raises questions about the conditions under which high-tech labor can contribute to the common good. (2023-2024)

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Ethnography of how grassroots organizations hold high-tech firms responsible as stewards for local community impact and benefits

This project is an ethnographic study of grassroots opposition to, and support of, Google’s proposed mega-campus in the San José Diridon Station area. The project explores how grassroots organizations contest high-tech firms’ responsibility for providing social services such as housing, transportation, and job training, as well as Google’s role as steward for San Jose’s environment and culture. (2023-2024)

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A history of the multilingual Internet

Today we can send and receive digital messages in any major language, but this wasn’t always the case. This project traces the evolution of type technologies and text standards to understand how we arrived at this point, and what is still left to do. (2022-2024)

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FOIA data, Civil Society and Immigration Enforcement

This project uses Freedom of Information Act requests to expand access to immigration enforcement data for civil society organizations and the public. This data contributes to identifying opportunities for advocacy and litigation by civil society organizations, and to evaluating the effectiveness of civil society efforts to protect immigrants. (2021-2022)

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Automating Suppression

This research examines how innovations in technology—including artificial intelligence, surveillance, and big data analytics—reshape authoritarian power, influence, and control. It explores how computational propaganda is being used to automate suppression and dissuade the political participation of women, minorities, and activist communities online. (2020-2022)

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Youth, Media Activism, and Communication Counterpower

This project investigates how young activists in Canada, the US, and Cambodia engage in contentious politics and social movements via social media. Based on field research with 100 young activists, it examines how they incorporate social media tactics into their political repertoires to navigate state and corporate digital surveillance. (2020-2022)

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Diffusion and Effects of Disinformation

Based on advanced computational techniques, including large-scale data analysis, online experiments, and computational simulation, this research aims to build novel theoretical frameworks and empirical analyses to further our understanding of disinformation, increasing political polarization and the manipulation of public discourse. (2020-2022)

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Public Education, Philanthropy and Civic Advocacy

This project explores the changing role of civic advocacy in American politics, focusing on the rapid increase in philanthropy in public schools. It combines archival research, social media data on advocacy and issue mobilization, and a national, longitudinal dataset of private and public spending in public education. (2019-2020)

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Libraries, Cultural Heritage Institutions, and Digital Civil Society

This project explores how digital civil society interacts with libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. It examines citizens’ mobilization through libraries, like the Internet Archive, as examples of digital civil society in action and identifies relevant legal frameworks to build accessible infrastructure for online content. (2018-2020)

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An History of Cyberlibertarianism

This project traces the circulation of cyberlibertarianism throughout the US technology community from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the Microsoft antitrust trial in 1999. It explores how widely different groups – from hackers and tech executives to civil liberties advocates – contributed to the apparition of cyberlibertarianism. (2018-2020)

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Free Basics and the African Digital Civil Society

This project traces the expansion of Facebook’s Free Basics program across Africa. By combining archival research and an innovative VPN-based method, it explores big tech’s growing engagement with civil society organizations; and the landscape of digital rights advocacy across Africa. (2018-2020)

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Distribute, Randomize, Rotate: Democratic Values in Design for Decentralized Data

This project seeks to develop theories of normative ethics for localized and decentralized communication, consensus and trust models such as mobile mesh networks and distributed multiparty cryptographic methods. (2017-2018)

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Exploring Public-Private Data Hybrid

This project explores how the distinction between public and private information goods are blurred through data sharing partnerships and services that combine digital public resources with citizen-generated and commercially-owned data. (2017-2018)

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