I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My work explores the interaction of media and American political and civic life. My current projects include ethnographic work on the campaign to defeat North Carolina’s Amendment One.
In a forthcoming book, Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics From Howard Dean to Barack Obama, and a series of journal articles I ask questions such as: how have technologies impacted opportunities for participation in electoral politics and civic affairs? How do new media technologies shape, and how are they shaped by, the actors in the public sphere? How do the forms of social organization made possible by new media rework our understandings and expectations of the state, law, and politics? And, what are the democratic promises, and perils, of conducting much of our political, economic, and social lives online? This site makes much of this research available in PDF format.
Recent blog posts at Culture Digitally:
The 2008 Campaign and Online Advertising
Dean, Romney, and Drupal: Values and Technological Adoption
The 2012 Obama Campaign, the Technological Sublime, and the Limits of Big Data
The Organization of New Media in the 2012 Campaign
The Periods Between Large Scale Protest Events
Dismantling Change, Parts One and Two
