In the confusion of our current times, we were not as quick about announcing the newest members of the Social Media Collective as we usually are. Like everyone, we find ourselves out of step with the timelessness of pandemic time. But as these new faces are showing up and settling in with us – on our video screens, if not in the lab – we wanted to share the good news, tell you all about them and their work.

Below you’ll meet three SMC interns, the newest postdoc to join the Social Media Collective, and a summer/fall 2020 visitor whose (virtual) arrival is just days away. And as a sign of how late this post is, the first intern you’ll meet has already finished their internship!

Tristan Gohring is a PhD student in Informatics at Indiana University. Their research intersects the fields of science and technology studies, social informatics, and gender studies. Their primary research is about gender as a classification system, and how gender classification gets used and embedded in technologies such as identification documents and online forms and profile pages. (Tristan was part of the joint MSR / E+D JEM Project PhD internship program; they were interning with us when we all had to start working from home, and they bravely completed their internship under these unexpected circumstances. Tristan really helped us think through how to move the SMC internship online. Many thanks!)

Amber Hamilton is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities interested in questions concerning race, technology, and digital media. Her dissertation, titled “Contestation and Articulations of Digital Blackness,” explores the embodiment of digital Blackness in the online lives of Black Twitter users and the multiple forms of cultural conversations that occur within the community to understand how race is articulated and maintained online. At the Social Media Collective, Amber is exploring the responses of social media and tech platforms to protests for racial justice in response to the murder of George Floyd. Amber holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Minnesota and a BA in Sociology from The Ohio State University.

Anna Gibson is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication at Stanford University working under the direction of Dr. Angèle Christin. She is interested in present and historical online communities, and her doctoral research focuses on the friction between these communities and the governance structures and organizations that make them possible. She was awarded a graduate fellowship at Stanford’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, and her work on the application of theories of democratic governance to social media platform content moderation practices has been published in Social Media + Society. This summer she is researching how platform companies talk about punishment with regards to content moderation.

Our newest postdoc, Niall Docherty recently completed his PhD at the Centre for Critical Theory, University of Nottingham. His thesis examines the material and discursive construction of Facebook’s ideal users, linking normative designations of “healthy” usership to neoliberal histories of governance through habit. Niall has a BA in Politics and an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, specialising in political theory, Modern philosophy and governmentality studies. His future projects include developing a conceptually rigorous rubric of habit to study the quality, possibility and limitations of everyday social media usage; empirically investigating how discourses of well-being are articulated in different social media environments; and further exploring how expressions of ‘living well’ on social media sites are enacted by users to function within apparatus of platform capitalism.

And finally, our faculty visitor from July-December, Angèle Christin is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and affiliated faculty in the Sociology Department and Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. Drawing on ethnographic methods, she studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices. Her book, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms  (Princeton University Press, 2020) focuses on the case of web journalism, analyzing the growing importance of audience analytics in web newsrooms in the U.S. and France. With the Social Media Collective, Angèle will work on a new research project on the paradoxes of algorithmic labor through an ethnographic study of influencers and influencer marketing firms on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Our best wishes to our most recent faculty visitor Desmond Patton, who has returned to Columbia University’s School of Social Work, and Elena Maris, who just completed her SMC postdoc and is now an assistant faculty in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago!