Policy Research
European Commission Horizon 2020 Project: NGI Forward
Senior Researcher and Ethnography Team Lead, 2019-2021
The NGI FORWARD project seeks to make a future Internet that is inclusive, just, and equitable. I conducted digital and in-person ethnographic research with European community members to shape the European Commission's policy on the future of the Internet. I recruited, trained and mentored a team of ethnographers with whom I coded and analysed ethnographic data. We then induced, visualised, and analysed semantic social networks from community member contributions. I was also responsible for maintaining a multi-language coding ontology across the duration and collaboration of the project and presenting our findings in written and verbal forms.
European Commission Horizon 2020 Project: POPREBEL
Senior Researcher and Ethnography Team Lead, 2019-2021
The POPREBEL project seeks to understand the rise of right-wing populist movements across Europe. I trained and led a team of ethnographers to elicit community discussions on populism (and on well-being in Europe in general) to analyse the causes and effects of populist movements for those living in affected countries. We coded in English, Polish, and Czech, working as a team to create a collective understanding of the situations in each context and generate an interactive map of community sentiment, problems, and inventive ways of coping with or fighting populism.
Swedish Arts Council Project: Babel Between Us
Senior Ethnographer and Research Advisor, 2019-2021
Babel Between Us is a cartographic visualisation of a collaboratively created fiction. A group of around 20 writers collectively improvised a story on an online forum over a year. I trained and mentored a team of ethnographers who analyse this fiction as it is written, taking the collaborative fictional world as an ethnographic field site. We coded the fiction and presented it as an interactive web-based map using semantic social network analysis.
European Commission Horizon 2020 Project: OpenCare
Ethnographer, 2016-2018
The Open Care project asked community members across the world how they cared for themselves and each other when existing health and social care systems could no longer or refused to serve them. As the sole ethnographer on this project, I performed digital and in-person ethnographic research for two years, analysing stories (in English, Arabic, and French) and presenting our findings to a range of audiences, both in written and spoken form. Using this ethnographic data, we generated a visualisation of community contributions, mapping their community-based care practices.
European Research Council Project: SOCNET
Research Assistant, 2013-2014
I worked as a Research Assistant to Professor Danny Miller at University College London on the ERC project "Social Network Sites and Social Science," later renamed to the "Why We Post" project. I conducted 25 interviews and participant observation on the England site of the 5 year, 7 country project. I wrote reports on research findings used by the PI to help write articles and books. I devised methods of qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing social media sites.