Dr. Isabelle Higgins, University of Sheffield, UK, will be presenting Children of Color and the Influencer Economy: The politics of everyday digital representation on Friday October 27 at noon in the Communication HUB, ILC N301. In this presentation, Dr. Higgins outlines findings from her PhD research undertaken at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge. She explores the intersectional inequalities reflected and reproduced through the work of white American social media influencer families with adopted children of color. She contextualizes this digital labor by thinking through histories of settler colonialism and their embodied and material articulation in the present, thereby placing her situated digital ethnographic research into a wider context of racial, reproductive and digital justice.
Dr. Higgins studied for her PhD at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge. Her work explores how internet use affects transnational and transracial adoption in the USA and reproduces intersectional forms of structural inequality. Isabelle's research interests center around drawing on reproductive sociology, the sociology of 'race' and racism and decolonial thought to explore the ways that everyday digital technology use shapes the lives of children and young people, particularly those experiencing multiple forms of marginalization. She is also committed to thinking reflexively about the function and effects of digital research methods. Isabelle has held fellowships at Cambridge Digital Humanities, the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress and the New School Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. She has published her empirical research with the journal New Media and Society.
The presentation will be introduced by Professor Jonathan Ong, UMass COMM.