Research Fellows 2018

Where is “center” and where is “periphery” in cultural history? Those questions have followed Ricardo Borrmann throughout his academic track as cultural historian and political scientist. He is currently associated member of the research group Laboratório Cidade e Poder at the Historical Institute of the Federal University Fluminense (UFF), in Rio de Janeiro, and has recently finished his PhD at the University of Munich (LMU). In his doctoral thesis he studied the transatlantic circulation of ideas between Germany and Latin America through the reception of German speaking academics in Brazilian legal culture of the 19th Century. He also worked as editorial assistant of Passagens – International Review of Political History and Legal Culture. His mains research topics are Brazilian and Latin American History, transatlantic circulation of ideas, intellectual networks and legal culture. He has conducted researches in various archives worldwide, such as in Jena, Vienna, Oxford and Rio de Janeiro. In his current postdoctoral research he deals with Brazilian film critic Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes (1916-1977) and his international network. The research aims at approaching cultural circulation of ideas and Latin American intellectual Networks through the case of Salles Gomes, questioning common sense and fixed categories such as “center” and “periphery” in film history.

Roser Beneito-Montagut is Lecturer in Digital Social Sciences at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University (UK). She is a member of the Digital Sociology Research Group (DSrG) and was a member of Cardiff Online Social Media Observatory (COSMOS). She is also associated with the Care and Preparedness in the Network Society (Carenet) research group at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute in the Open University of Catalonia (Spain).  She is interested in digital ethnographic projects and also excited about the critical exploration of the possibilities that the use of what is being called “big data” has opened up for social researchers to better understand what is going on in society. Her current research focuses on how social media “affects“ everyday life social relationships and everyday life mediated affects (and emotions). She is particularly interested in studying social media experience in later life, the emerging notions of care in digital societies and social isolation. During the past years she has conducted research in interdisciplinary settings, working with computer scientists, engineers and social scientists. She was a research fellow in a EU funded project (Disaster 2.0) enquiring the role of Social Media and its adoption by public sector organizations for risk and crisis communication. More recently, she was PI in a research project studying social media use in later life and she is currently co-investigator on an international research project entitled “Being Connected at Home: Making use of digital devices in later life”. Her research has been funded by a number of organizations and has been published in several peer-refereed journals, such as Qualitative Research and Sociological Perspectives. 

Sandra Jeppesen is Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies/Media Studies at Lakehead University Orillia, Canada (2010-present). As co-founder of the Media Action Research Group (MARG, mediaactionresearch.org), she researches with autonomous media and anti-authoritarian social movements from an intersectional LGBTQ+, feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist & decolonizing perspective. Funded by a five-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, MARG has conducted global interviews with grassroots media activists on issues of resources, collective memory and anti-oppression practices. As Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal (2007-2010), she was a member of the Collectif de Recherche sur l’Autonomie Collective (CRAC; Research Group on Collective Autonomy), which worked with:in ten anti-authoritarian groups and networks in Quebec to document and analyze their/our social movement and media activism. Currently Dr Jeppesen is a board member of the Research Centre for Sustainable Communities, and holds the Lakehead University Research Chair (LURC) in Transformative Media and Social Movements. Under the auspices of the LURC, she is partnering with the Orillia Native Women’s Group on a storytelling research project, which uses creative arts methods to better understand the importance of Indigenous women telling their stories in creating community and supporting healing and resilience. As part of a community knowledge mobilization strategy, she is working with local activists to develop a series of social justice workshops focusing on the recent transmedia hashtag activism and intersectional translocal protest movements #metoo, #IdleNoMore and #BlackLivesMatter. Under contract with UBC Press, Sandra Jeppesen is writing a book on Transformative Intersectional Media and Social Movements, due for publication in 2019.

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and senior lecturer in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. Using theories from political economy and new materialism, he examines digital industries and digital activists. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. He is presently working on a book about hacktivist prosecution called Hacker States and a book and experimental video called System Earth Cable about „elemental media“–atmospheric and undersea information infrastructures in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Iceland, and Indonesia. This project deploys drones to map the undersea fibre optical cable system as seen here at Landeyjasandur, Iceland.

Beata Ociepka currently works at the Instytut Studiów Międzynarodowych/ Institute of International Studies, University of Wroclaw. She does research in Political Communication, Public Diplomacy, Foreign Policy and International Communication. Her current project is focused on Years and Seasons of Culture as Media Events and framed by New Public Diplomacy.

Payal Arora is an Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Founder and Executive Director of Catalyst Lab, a center that ignites relations between academia, business and the public on matters of social concern. Her research challenges normative understandings of the impact of new technologies on the world’s marginalized communities. She has published over forty papers in the last decade on poverty and technology, researching digital practice in the favelas in Brazil, slums in India to the ghettos in the Bronx in New York. She has authored books on this subject including the award-winning Leisure Commons: A spatial history of Web 2.0, Dot Com Mantra: Social Computing in the Central Himalayas, Crossroads in New media, Identity and Law, and the upcoming book Poor@Play: Digital life beyond the West with Harvard University Press. She has given more than a 100 talks in 67 cities in 28 countries. Arora sits on several boards including the Columbia University’s Earth Institute Connect to Learn, the Technology, Knowledge & Society Association, and the World Women Global Council in New York. She was a Fellow at GE and NYU. 

Göran Bolin is Professor in Media & Communication Studies at Södertörn University. Bolins current research interests are focussed on cultural production and consumption in contemporary culture industries, and how relationships between these are altered by digitization and marketization processes. His most recent work is summarised in Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets (Ashgate, 2011), in the edited volume Cultural Technologies. The Shaping of Culture in Media and Society (Routledge, 2012), and in his most recent book Media Generations: Experience, Identity and Mediatised Social Change (Routledge 2016). Bolin has since the early 1990s worked in or headed research projects on violence in the media, youth and cultural production, entertainment television and the relation between production practices and textual expressions, media consumption and the production of value in cultural industries, media structure and use in the Baltic Sea region, mobile phone use, media generations, etc.

Tom Van Hout is Associate Professor and Academic Director of the Institute for Professional and Academic Communication at the University of Antwerp. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Linguistics at Leiden University. His work focuses broadly on the circulation and articulation of knowledge in society. His research draws on linguistics, anthropology, management studies and media studies to understand society’s heightened concern with communication under conditions of globalization. That means he studies meaning making processes in a range of contexts from the perspective of participants to grasp how expertise is performed, audiences are anticipated, and social events get represented.

Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation funded scholar, is a social scientist and design researcher. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design and and Affiliated Faculty in the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she is Director of the Critical Futures Lab. Her research is focused on the aesthetics and politics of socio-technical systems and infrastructures at the intersection between emerging technologies, material practices and the future of cities; specifically, she writes about emergent forms of work, organizing and urbanism. Forlano’s research and writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Catalyst, She Ji, Design Issues, the Journal of Peer Production, Fibreculture, Digital Culture & Society, ADA, Journal of Urban Technology, First Monday, The Information Society, Journal of Community Informatics, IEEE Pervasive Computing and Science and Public Policy. She is co-editor with Marcus Foth, Christine Satchell and Martin Gibbs of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011). She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

Raoni Rajão is professor in Social Studies of Science at the Department of Production Engineering at UFMG – Federal University of Minas Gerais. He has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (Laurea in Informatica) from Universita degli studi di MILANO-BICOCCA (2005), MRes in IT, Management & Organisational Change and PhD in Organisation, Work and Technology, both from Lancaster University (2011). Raoni’s research focuses on the relation between science, technology and policy, with a particular emphasis on environmental policy evaluation and the study of the role of ICT (information and communication technologies) in deforestation control policies and payment for environmental services. He has collaborated with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), German Technical Cooperation (GIZ) and Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM). At the moment he is the principal investigator of two research projects funded by CNPq and FAPEMIG.