In Progress

Harvey Dodds
Harvey holds a BA in Politics from the University of Leeds and an MSc in Social Psychology from the University of Edinburgh. His PhD, focusing on representation of social class on social media, is funded by the the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C) at Loughborough University.

Andrew Ross
Andrew holds a BSc in Psychology from the University of Durham and an MA in Politics from the University of East Anglia. His PhD explores public opinion, disinformation, and meta-perceptions of democracy. Andrew is a member of the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C) at Loughborough. His project is funded by a 1+3 award from the ESRC Midlands Doctoral Training Partnership. His previous research has been published in New Media & Society.

Awarded

Dr Nick Anstead (2009)
Nick’s thesis, which was nominated by Royal Holloway’s Department of Politics and International Relations for the European Consortium for Political Research’s Jean Blondel Prize, was concerned with how structural differences between the British and American party systems shape political uses of the Internet during election campaigns. Nick is currently an Associate Professor in Political Communication in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.

Dr Catherine R. Baker (2022)
Catherine’s PhD, ‘Infrastructures of Male Supremacism: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of the Incel Wiki’ combined digital affordances and discursive psychology perspectives to explain how the Incel wiki functions as a rhetorical tool to inoculate misogynist Incels against criticism while simultaneously reinforcing ingroup identity and semantic control. She shows how pseudo-science functions as a particularly important, and previously under-researched, rhetorical strategy of extreme misogyny, and positions biological determinism as a central organising logic of male supremacism. Her research was funded by the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C) at Loughborough University. Catherine is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Dublin City University’s Anti-Bullying Centre.

Dr Aaron Bastani (2015)
Aaron’s thesis was entitled “Strike! Occupy! Retweet!: The Relationship Between Collective and Connective Action in Austerity Britain.” He is the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (Verso, 2019), co-founder of Novara Media, and a contributor to the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Vice, Left Foot Forward, and Open Democracy, among many other outlets.

Dr Simon Collister (2019)
Simon’s thesis was entitled “Hybridity, Materiality & Choreography: Towards a Theory of Mediated Power in a Networked Communication Environment.” Simon studied part time. Following a period as Senior Lecturer in Communication at the University of the Arts, London, he returned to professional public relations practice with Blackbook London, before taking up his current role as Director of the Human Understanding Lab at UNLIMITED.

Dr James Dennis (2015)
James’ PhD was entitled “It’s Better to Light a Candle than to Fantasise About a Sun”: Exploring Social Media and “Slacktivism.” His research provides an extended critique of the popular idea of “slacktivism,” and he sets this out with a radical and highly innovative multi-method research design consisting of ethnographic fieldwork, media consumption diaries, and a series of lab experiments. He was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council South East Doctoral Training Consortium and I co-supervised him with Professor Ben O'Loughlin. James was awarded his doctorate in November 2015 and from June 2016 he is a permanent Senior Lecturer in Journalism in the School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies at the University of Portsmouth. His dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association Information Technology and Politics Section Best Dissertation Award, 2017. For more information about his research and teaching, see his website.

Dr Christopher Frazier-Crawford Boerl (2012)
Christopher researched the internet’s role in civic engagement, mobilization and social capital, based on an analysis of the role of religious organizations in US politics. Dr Boerl was communications manager for Mike Williams for Congress 2012, currently works for Teach for America, a U.S.-wide educational non-profit, and is chair for New Bedford in the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

Dr Yenn Lee (2009)
Yenn Lee’s thesis focused on mobilisation and civic engagement on the Internet, on the basis of a case study of the Nosama movement in South Korea. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Research Methodology and Deputy Director of the Doctoral School at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Dr Declan McDowell-Naylor (2019)
Declan’s project examined, through ethnographic methods, the processes of “public making” in the development of driverless car technology. His thesis was entitled “The Participatory, Communicative, and Organisational Dimensions of Public-Making: Public Engagement and The Development of Autonomous Vehicles in the United Kingdom.” I co-supervised his project (externally after I moved to Loughborough University) with Professor Ben O’Loughlin. Declan is currently a Principal Policy Officer at the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Dr Amy P. Smith (2018)
Amy examined elite control of political communication in the hybrid media system. Her thesis was entitled “Commodification and control: news media agenda setting during the 2015 United Kingdom general election.” She was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council South East Doctoral Training Consortium. I co-supervised her project with Professor Ben O’Loughlin. Amy currently works as a Researcher Development Officer at the University of Manchester.

Dr Ellen Watts (2018)
Ellen’s PhD, “Celebrities as Political Representatives: Explaining the Exchangeability of Celebrity Capital in the Political Field” is about how celebrities use media to establish representative claims to act politically. She was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council South East Doctoral Training Consortium. I co-supervised her project (externally after I moved to Loughborough University) with Professor Ben O’Loughlin. Ellen is currently an Assistant Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham.

Previous

Meghan E. Conroy
Meghan’s PhD research examined extreme right-wing online influencers in the United States. Her project was funded by the Online Civic Culture Centre at Loughborough University. In January 2022, Meghan suspended her doctoral research in order to become a full-time policy advisor (Professional Staff Member) to the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.