Digitized Institutions
Edited by Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory and Tressie McMillan Cottom
Published
Nov 18, 2016Page count
216 pagesISBN
978-1447329091Imprint
Policy PressPublished
Nov 18, 2016Page count
216 pagesISBN
978-1447329107Imprint
Policy Press
Digitized Institutions
A key sociological insight is that institutions, whether education, the economy, politics or the media, shape the contours of individual life and drive inequality. In this Byte, the contributions take up the way that digitally meditated social processes are transforming institutions. The writing here examines the interconnectedness of institutions and considers digitization across schooling, work, and media, with an eye toward how inequality works.
Together, these selections yield important insights into critical features of the institutions that mediate our digitized society, arguing that digital sociology’s greatest challenge is measuring inequalities that are produced by society’s datalogical turn.
Jessie Daniels is a professor, author and an internationally recognized expert on the Internet manifestations of racism. She is the author of two books about race and various forms of media, as well as dozens of peer-reviewed articles in journals such as New Media & Society, Gender & Society, American Journal of Public Health, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She co-founded Racism Review, with Joe R. Feagin, and was awarded a Ford Foundation grant for JustPublics@365. In 2014, Contexts Magazine profiled her as “Pioneering Digital Sociology.
Karen Gregory is a lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on contemporary spirituality, precarity, entrepreneurialism and digital media. Her writings have appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Women and Performance, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and Visual Studies. Karen is the founder of CUNY Graduate Center’s Digital Labor Working Group, which was featured in The Atlantic.
Tressie McMillan Cottom is a former fellow at the Microsoft Social Media Collective, the Center for Poverty Research at UC-Davis and she serves on the American Sociological Association’s “Task Force on Engaging Sociology”. Her work has examined education expansion, media, technology and the intersections of race, class and gender. And her publications have appeared in Contexts, Western Journal of Emergency Medicine and Human Affairs as well as edited volumes. Tressie’s public sociology has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic and NPR. Her blog and social media accounts have numerous citations and awards.
