I am very pleased to announce the recipient of the 2014 AoIR Dissertation Award: “From Farm to Farmville: Circulation, Adoption, and Use of ICT between Urban and Rural China” by Dr. Elisa Oreglia.
Dr. Oreglia received her PhD in Information Management and Systems from the UC Berkeley School of Information. Her dissertation is an ethnographic case study of the diffusion and appropriation of information & communication technologies, such as mobile phones and computers, among rural Chinese residents and migrant workers.
There were also two honorable mentions: “A Multi-method Examination of Race, Class, Gender, Sexual Orientation, and Motivations for Participation in the YouTube-based “It Gets Better Project”” by Dr. Laurie Phillips (UNC-Chapel Hill) and “YouTube Shakespeares: Encountering Ethical, Theoretical, and Methodological Challenges in Researching Online Performance” by Dr. Valerie Fazel (Arizona State University)
As chair of the Dissertation Award committee, I would also like to extend my deep appreciation to the committee members: Kath Albury, Ben Light, Alice Marwick, and Katrin Weller. We received twenty-six submissions to review, and were quite impressed with the high quality and great variety of the dissertations that is indicative of the strength (and the future) of Internet studies.
Please join me in congratulating Drs. Oreglia, Phillips and Fazel!
Michael Zimmer
Chair, AoIR Dissertation Award Committee
Treasurer, AoIR
