The SMC internship doesn’t just bring us bright students, eager to take on original research projects and be part of the SMC and MSRNE community for the summer. It certainly does that. But it also makes us grow – we get blown open every time we welcome such a startling range of people, of topics, of perspectives. We look, of course, for the kind of students who we want to see succeed in our field. But there are a lot of ways to do that. Check out this year’s interns, below.

Also, we want to express our gratitude to everyone who applied. There were, as always, so many amazing applicants who would have also been fascinating and talented additions to the SMC. We wish we could bring in more of you. (Remember, we offer these internships every summer: if you’re an advanced PhD student in the areas of communication, the anthropology or sociology of new media, information science, and related fields, watch this page for when we open next year’s call.)

Anna Banchik is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin interested in digital media cultures, knowledge production, public archives, and social movements. Based on a year-long study of the Human Rights Investigations Lab at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, her dissertation examines the rise of online open source investigations in human rights fact-finding and advocacy, and assesses its implications for participation, pluralism, and power in the human rights field. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and P.E.O. International among other institutions, and has been published in Law & Social Inquiry and Gender & Society. At the Social Media Collective, she will research how content removals from social media platforms impact the work of human rights organizations dedicated to collecting, using, and preserving user-generated content depicting conflicts and atrocities.

Jabari Evans is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University and works under the direction of Dr. Ellen Wartella in the Center on Media and Human Development. He received his B.A. in Communication and Culture with a minor in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and then went on to earn his MSW from the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work. Prior to Northwestern, Jabari enjoyed a decorated career as a hip hop songwriter and producer performing under the moniker of “Naledge” in the Chicago rap group Kidz in the Hall. Jabari’s research focuses on the music sub-cultures that urban adolescents of color develop and inhabit, collectively and individually, to learn about and understand their social environments, emotional development and professional aspirations. His dissertation focuses on Hip-Hop as pedagogy of practice in the music classroom and how youth digital media programs can increase civic engagement.  Most recently, Jabari has founded his nonprofit organization (The Brainiac Project Inc.) to leverage the combination of social media and a burgeoning local hip-hop scene as a means for violence prevention in Chicago’s South Side communities.  

Nina Medvedeva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota and is co-advised by Dr. Aren Aizura and Dr. Miranda Joseph. Her research seeks to understand how different instances of home become normalized while others unravel as contested sites. Using an ethnographic research design consisting of participant observation, interviews, media analysis, GIS spatial analysis, and archival research, her work investigates how the practice of short-term renting on Airbnb affects the labor done in the home, the nature of gentrification in major cities, and grassroots mobilizations around urban governance. She holds a Master of Arts in American Studies from the University of Maryland: College Park.

Gili Vidan is a PhD candidate at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard and a research fellow at the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is interested in the stabilization of digital technologies and media, changing notions of public trust and democratic governance, and narratives of crisis and future-making in the US. Her dissertation traces technical attempts to solve the problems of trust and transparency, with a focus on the development of electronic payment systems and public-key cryptography in late 20th- and early 21st-century US. At the Social Media Collective, she will explore how certain media, like paper money, were made irreproducible, in an age of digital visual editing and publishing software. Gili holds a MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute and a BA from Harvard College. She is a graduate fellow at the EJ Safra Center for Ethics and an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center.