UPDATE: One more to add!

Muira McCammon is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and holds a Master in Law from Penn Law. She studies how information flows through the U.S. administrative state, and her dissertation examines government deletion practices on Twitter. She has published on this work in New Media & Society and Information, Communication, & Society. At Microsoft Research, Muira will work with danah boyd on questions related to transparency, government speech, and public-sector data infrastructures.

While we can’t welcome them in person, given the circumstances of the world, we’re truly fortunate to have even more than our usual share arriving remotely, for postdoc and intern positions at the Social Media Collective. Please join me in welcoming them!

Karina Rider is our incoming SMC postdoc for 2021-2023! Karina is finishing her PhD in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of civic technology volunteering in the San Francisco Bay Area, and explores the relationship between “tech for good” initiatives, network capitalism, and municipal governments. She has an MA in Sociology from the University of Washington and a BA in Sociology from San José State University. Her next project is a comparative study of how local, grassroots organizations mobilize in order to resist efforts by technology companies to build large corporate campuses in different cities around the world.

Andrea Alarcón is joining Microsoft Research New England as an intern, working with Mary Gray and the Social Media Collective, to examine transnational labor flows and the digital economy. Andrea is particularly interested in studying the appropriation of social media platforms as gateways to the web, and transnational, online labor cultures. Before becoming a PhD candidate at USC Annenberg, Andrea received her MSc degree from the Oxford Internet Institute, and her BSc in online journalism from the University of Florida. She also worked as a Research Assistant with Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective. Before academia, she worked as a web producer and editor for the World Bank, and in social media for Discovery Channel in Latin America.

Benjamin Ale-Ebrahim is joining Microsoft Research New England as a joint MSR / E+D JEM Project Intern, working with Mary Gray and the Social Media Collective studying gender identity and pronoun use in the workplace. His dissertation research explores the relationship between social media platform policies and the development of LGBTQ+ social movements in the Middle East and North Africa. He will be working remotely over the summer while he completes his doctoral dissertation in sociocultural anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Kristen Bowen is a PhD candidate in Information Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, and has just begun her internship working with Nancy Baym and the SMC. Her research centers the online information behavior of marginalized populations (particularly individuals with nonapparent disabilities and/or members of minoritized racial groups). The primary goal is to determine the ways social media & technology support or act as barriers to the health and wellbeing of these populations. Her dissertation research examines Black emerging adults’ (18-25) information exchange experiences on their mental wellbeing regarding experienced sexual violence. This summer, Kristen is exploring the influence of remote work on the wellbeing of Black adults, inclusive of individuals with disabilities.

Tristan Gohring is a PhD candidate in Informatics at Indiana University. They are returning to Microsoft Research New England as a joint MSR / E+D JEM Project Intern, working with Mary Gray and the Social Media Collective studying gender identity and pronoun use in the workplace. Their doctorial research sits at the intersecting 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.

Calvin Liang will join Microsoft Research New England as a Research Intern working with Mary Gray in the Social Media Collective on the Pandemic Response Network Project. He is a third year PhD Student in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research explores the intersections of queerness, health, and technology by examining how to design technological interventions that support LGBTQ+ people with their health and challenge normative values and practices in health more broadly.

Katherine Lou will join Microsoft Research New England as a Research Intern working with Mary Gray in the Social Media Collective on the Pandemic Response Network Project. She’s currently finishing her last semester at Harvard University, where she’s studying sociology and computer science. Her work lies at the intersection of technology and the social sciences, to build tech that enables meaningful human connections.

Rida Qadri is joining Microsoft Research New England as an intern with Mary Gray and the SMC to work on questions about the future of digital work in the Global South. She is currently a PhD candidate in Urban Information Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research seeks to uncover the myriad ways in which human labor and informal relationships sustain digital technologies, particularly in non-western contexts. By exploring the limited efficiencies of algorithmic mediation within the Global South, she hopes to contribute to more inclusive technological artifacts. Her dissertation examines the social relationships and strategies of resistance crafted by Jakarta’s platform motorbike-taxi drivers as they labor in the city’s app-mediated mobility market.

Kate Sim has already arrived, and is in the midst of her spring internship working with Tarleton Gillespie and the SMC. She is a PhD Candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute interested in questions of gender, violence, power, and digital media. Her dissertation examines the ethical, cultural, and legal implications of data-driven reporting systems used for campus safety in US higher education. At the SMC, she is exploring how platform companies figure ideas of harm and care in their content moderation and the mechanisms for user contact and complaint. 

Ihudiya Finda Williams is a PhD candidate and Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information. Her research occurs at the intersection of race, class, and technology. Her dissertation focuses on understanding and developing tools and resources with and for returning citizens (formerly incarcerated individuals), specifically to enhance digital literacy for job search. At the Social Media Collective, Ihudiya will be exploring the online meeting experiences of African Americans in various work settings. She holds a M.Ed in Technology, Innovation, and Education from Harvard University, and a BS in Information Technology from Rochester Institute of Technology. Ihudiya publishes under her pen name, Ihudiya Finda Ogbonnaya-Ogburu.