We get the sharpest, most impressive crop of applicants for ourSocial Media Collective internship, it is no easy task to turn away so many extremely promising PhD students. But it is a pleasure to introduce those we did select. (Keep in mind that we offer these internships every summer; if you will be an advanced graduate student in our field in the summer of 2018, keep an eye on this blog or for updates to this page for the next deadline.) For 2017, we are proud to have the following young scholars joining us:

At Microsoft Research New England

  Ysabel Gerrard is a PhD Candidate in the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds. Her doctoral thesis examines teen drama fans’ negotiations of their (guilty) pleasures in an age of social media. In addition to her research and teaching, Ysabel is the Young Scholars’ Representative for ECREA’s Digital Culture and Communication section, and is currently co-organising the Data Power Conference 2017 (along with two others). She has published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry and has presented her work at numerous international conferences, such as ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association) and Console-ing Passions. Ysabel will be investigating Instagram and Tumblr’s responses to public discourses about eating disorders.

 

Elena Maris is a PhD Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the ways media industries and audiences work to influence one another, with a focus on technological strategies and the roles of gender and sexuality. She also studies the ways identity is represented and experienced in popular culture, often writing about race, gender and sexuality in television, fandom and Hip-Hop. Her work has been published in Critical Studies in Media Communication and the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

 

At Microsoft Research New York City:

Aaron Shapiro is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. He also holds an M.A. in Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Urban Studies. Aaron previously worked as a field researcher and supervisor at NO/AIDS Task Force in New Orleans, conducting social research with communities at high risk for HIV. His current research addresses the cultural politics of urban data infrastructures, focusing on issues of surveillance and control, labor subjectivities, and design imaginaries. His work has been published in Nature, Space & Culture, Media, Culture & Society, and New Media & Society. He will be working on a study about bias in machine learning.