Emilie Whitaker

Emilie is a lecturer at Cardiff University in the School of Social Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Applied Social Studies, University of Birmingham. Building on her research and policy experience Emilie is interested in the interplay between knowledge and action, theory and practice. Her ethnographic work centres on cultures, practices and experiences of care and how knowledge is constructed, enacted and challenged in everyday frontline encounters between professionals, families and institutional actors. As an ethnographer Emilie is acutely aware of the challenges of data collection in the digital age and has an interest in exploring the philosophical, theoretical and practical challenges of disembodied data collection and research. Finally, Emilie has an interest in futures – specifically trans and post-humanity. She is interested in the inter-relational aspects of our technological future particularly how we love, the nature of family and matters of intimacy. In her work on ‘visioneering’ she is interested in exploring how people today conceive of the future, utopian/dystopian thought and how actors experience and understand the increasing intermeshing of the human body with technology.

Emilie tweets @Dr_EmWhitaker

Adam Edwards

Is co-founder of the Digital Sociology Research Group at Cardiff University. Previously he co-founded the Collaborative On-line Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS). Under the auspices of these two groups he has contributed to conceptual, methodological and empirical innovations in digital social research. These include the study of social media communications and their role in augmenting and re-orienting research into social problems such as civil unrest, surveillance, hate speech and ‘digital wildfires’. The latter are defined as, ‘social media interactions in which misleading or provocative content spreads rapidly with very negative impact’, and provoke questions about the technical and political feasibility of regulating social media in ways that can reconcile interests in freedom of speech and the reduction of harm. To investigate these questions, he is interested in the use of deliberative methods, such as the policy Delphi, and innovations in the capture and content analysis of social media interactions or ‘threads’ to ascertain the impact of (self)regulation in on-line communications. Adam is also interested in the disruptive impact of these and other digital technologies on issues of security and social change and, therefore, the interface between on-line and off-line social relations. This interface includes the use of algorithms to enhance anticipatory forms of governance, such as predictive policing and the automation of surveillance, provoking, in turn, questions about the ethical and political limits to machine learning and the role of human input into digital governance and regulation. Adam is currently bringing these various interests together in his ongoing research into Urban Governance and Security in “Smart” Cities.

Adam Edwards tweets @cosmosae

William Housley

Professor William Housley, PhD, DSc.Econ, is a sociologist who works across a number of research areas that include language and interaction, social media, the social aspects of disruptive technologies and the emerging contours of digital society, economy and culture. Professor Housley was a co-founder of COSMOS and is currently working on a number of ESRC funded projects that relate to digital society and research; he co-convenes the Digital Sociology Research Group, is co-editor of Qualitative Research (SAGE) and serves on the editorial board of Big Data and Society (SAGE).

William Housley tweets @ProfWilHousley

Roser Beneito-Montagut

Roser is a lecturer in Digital Social Sciences at Cardiff University in the School of Social Sciences. She holds a Ph.D Fine Arts, MRes Sociology, MA Multimedia, BA(Hons) Communication and BA(Hons) in Fine Art. She is interested in interpersonal relationships and emotions on the social web, digital inequalities and mixed research methods in digital sociology. She is also keen on exploring methods to use the “big data” produced by Social Media for sociology. During the past years she conducted research in interdisciplinary settings, working with computer scientists, engineers and social scientists. She is currently PI on a funded research project -entitled “Elderly and Social Media: Bridging the gap of e-Marginality”- studying how older people use the social media and whether social media can help to mitigate social isolation.

Roser tweets @roserrr

Carina Girvan

Carina is a lecturer in Education in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. She holds a PhD from the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin. Previously a primary school teacher, Carina’s research sits at the intersection of education and computer science. She is interested in the innovative use of new and existing technologies to develop solutions to small and large-scale problems in teaching and learning. Her recent work has focused on the design and implementation of pedagogically underpinned learning experiences in virtual worlds. This largely exploratory research has centred on the experience of the learner within these spaces.

Carina tweets @cgirvan

Oliver Ellis

Oliver is a PhD student in Cardiff University’s School of Social Sciences as recipient of an ESRC +3 studentship award, and graduate of the Social Science Research Methods (SSRM) MSc. His doctoral research is entitled ‘Re-Imagining National Identity in the Digital Age’, as it seeks to explore how digital-social platforms are reinvigorating the formation and expression of national identities in the UK and beyond, reconceptualising the formation of a shared national consciousness by homogenous groups in the web 2.0 era.

More broadly though, he is interested in how such digital platforms can be conceived as the manifestation of a new, interactive ‘public sphere’ and excited by the growing access to big data sources that render these new forms of social interaction – that are the sites for identity building and value exchange – accessible for study. His interests in digital sociology combine concerns with media and communication infrastructures (carried over from my undergraduate BA in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies) with a distinct late modern sociological perspective, that interrogates the impact of networked, digital social relations on the processes of group identity and community formation.

Chiara Poletti

Chiara is an ESRC funded student, currently enrolled in the 1+3 programme within the Wales Doctoral Training Centre at Cardiff University. She holds a B.A in Sociology from the University of Trento (Italy) and Nantes (France) and a MA in International Relations from the School of International Studies in Trento.
Her research interests are interdisciplinary. She worked on comparative education systems, European and international governance and development studies. More recently, she has been interested in issues concerning the governance of the Internet and digital social life. In her research “ Language, rights and citizenship in the digital age. The case of Charlie Hebdo” she focuses on the interactions that took place on social network sites (namely Twitter) in the aftermath of the attack in Paris on January 2015. In particular, she is interested in understanding how tweets have been used to frame the event in terms of freedom of speech and hate speech, and the possible implications in the development of public debates and the regulation of contents in an online environment.

You can contact her by email on polettic@cardiff.ac.uk or on Twitter @ccpollon

Daniel Gray

He is a postgraduate student at Cardiff University, currently doing a master’s degree as part of a four year PhD scholarship. Broadly, his research interests include sociology, the social consequences of new technologies, social change, social inequality, ideology, gender and discourse. Currently he is working on a dissertation project investigating misogynistic discourse and hate speech on Twitter, using new methods of data collection available at Cardiff University.
With this project he intends to explore ways of reconciling computational methods of data collection, which gather many thousands of individual tweets, with detailed critical discourse analysis. With this kind of analysis he wants to examine the content and form of misogynistic hate speech as well as its social significance, with the intention of adding to the political critique of online misogyny.

His research also investigates the ethical implications of dealing with large amounts of potentially sensitive data in qualitative analysis. Ethics and informed consent are very delicate issues in online research since these spaces blur the boundaries between private and public, and research such as his which deals directly with discourse presents specific challenges. This is because he will be collecting and analysing potentially sensitive information which participants may not have intended to be widely viewed, and may even be linked to their personal information. As such he intends this research to act as an exploration of these issues.

Zakaria Sajir

Zak is a PhD candidate at the University of Leicester, funded by a three-year Joint Sociology-Politics College Scholarship. He holds an M.A. in European and International Studies from the School of International Studies of the University of Trento, Italy, and a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Milano Bicocca, Italy.
In his PhD thesis `Placing Political Engagement of Third Country Nationals in Context. A Comparative Study on the Impact of Contextual Factors on the Degree and Type of Political Engagement of the Moroccans Residing in Europe’, he investigates the effects that different contextual factors have on migrants’ political engagement.
Zak is broadly interested also in the interaction between offline and online life, and how non-autochthonous public engagement in civic affairs can be facilitated or promoted through online platforms; more specifically he is interested in understanding how internet technologies are used by migrant groups to promote their collective identities and deal with stigma and prejudice; extend the scope of the political opportunities available within the countries of residence; and build links with the country of origin and maintain a large scale transnational migrant community in Europe.

Zak tweets @ZakSajir