We are excited to welcome three new members to the research team! Ryland Shaw recently joined us as a predoctoral research assistant; he is completing his MA in Communication from Simon Fraser University. And this month we are joined by two new postdoctoral researchers, Zoë Glatt and Chuncheng Liu! Zoë just completed her PhD from the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. Chuncheng just completed his PhD in the Departments of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. So excited to have them!

Zoë Glatt completed her PhD in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE; she also holds an MA Digital Media from Goldsmiths University and a BA Social Anthropology from SOAS. Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of the London influencer industry (2017-2023) that interrogates the ways in which platformisation marks an intensification of conditions of precarity and inequality for cultural workers. She is the Co-Founder of the The Digital Ethnography Collective, an interdisciplinary group exploring the intersections of digital culture and ethnographic methods, and is regularly interviewed as a social media expert for outlets such as Wired, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Time, and Vice. At the SMC she will be working on a book project, The Platformised Creative Worker: Inequality, Co-Option and Resistance in the Influencer Industry.

Chuncheng Liu completed his Ph.D. in sociology and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests span science and technology studies (STS), political sociology, critical data studies, economic sociology, and medical sociology. His research focuses on the politics of classification in action in two empirical domains: algorithmic systems and public health. His dissertation utilizes mixed methods to examine the contestation and multiplicity of the Chinese Social Credit System across different stages. His next project will investigate the construction and operation of the transnational data market infrastructure.

Ryland Shaw is completing his MA in Communication from Simon Fraser University. His MA thesis assesses TikTok as a platform for climate crisis communication while developing methods to better understand contemporary algorithmic and navigationally-obfuscated digital platforms. He has contributed to numerous interdisciplinary research projects related to environmental communication, internet platform studies, and digital social science research methods. Ryland’s research, which often tends to the audiovisual dimensions of online communication, is informed by his background in documentary production and as a long-time instructor at his university’s public makerspace.