Under the broad umbrella of information, technology, policy, and society my research focuses on Internet governance, information policy, and civic engagement in policymaking.
Internet governance
“Internet Governance. Actors, Technology, Content” conference at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. Berlin, Germany, October 2014.
My interest in Internet governance grew out of my fascination with media economics and the digital divide. It began when I was working on my Master’s and participated in, as well as helped with, the International Telecommunication Union youth events. It really took off when I worked on my PhD and learned from people such as Tarleton Gillespie and Milton Mueller. Today my work in this area is twofold. First I am interested in the participatory practices in the emerging Internet governance spaces. This includes enactment of ideas such as multistakeholderism, and questions of authority, trust, and legitimacy of various stakeholders and different forms of participation. Second, I am interested in the Internet governance discourse and in framing of policy issues and principles (such as privacy, net-neutrality, and multistakeholderism among others). Some of my projects in this area include:
- Study of policy issue-framing propagation across policy deliberation spaces.
- The use of computational methods (e.g. NLP) for the study of Internet governance discourse.
- Analysis of practices of regional and national Internet Governance Forum initiatives.
Information policy
Engaging in the study of the practices and discourses of Internet governance one has also to engage with substantive topics. First, focusing on policy discourse, I am interested in assumptions embedded in the framing of information policy issues. For example, you might have heard about young people these days not carrying at all about their privacy or about URLs being used to assess the quality of online content. Some of those assertions have been empirically tested, but many have not. Second, focusing on policymaking practices, I am interested in expanding the notions of governance to account not only for formal policymaking, but also for technology design and use. At the moment, I want to focus explicitly on:
- Using social science methods to testing assumptions behind policy issue framing.
- Social and semantic network analysis of information policy discourse.
Civic engagement in policymaking
My work on practices of participation in Internet governance deliberation spaces lead me to an exciting postdoc with CeRI (Cornell eRulemaking Initiative) lead by Cynthia Farina and Claire Cardie. There I started working on a series of question pertaining to design of online spaces and practices for civic participation in policymaking. I also got interested in broader questions of what engaging with policymaking does to building a stronger polity and what may affect such experiences. Some of my work in this area includes:
- Predictors and influences of online engagement in policy deliberation.
- Barriers to effective online engagement in online policy deliberation.
- Interface and process designs for online policy deliberation.
Updated: July 2016