Congratulations to the recipient of this year’s AoIR Dissertation Award. The award-winning dissertation, “Programmed sociality: A software studies perspective on social networking sites,” was written by Taina Bucher. Bucher received her PhD from the University of Oslo and is currently a Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo. Her dissertation examines the connections between social networking software and sociality, looking in particular at the ways that software influences norms and forms of social life.
Congratulations are also extended to Lauren Sessions Goulet and Yukari Seko, who each received Honorable Mentions from the committee. Goulet received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her dissertation is titled “Friends in all the right places: Social resources and geography in the age of social network sites.” She currently works as a researcher at Facebook. Seko received her PhD from York University with a dissertation titled “Wound uploaders: Visual narratives of self-injury on social media.” She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at Social Aetiology of Mental Illness (SAMI) at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)
Thank you to the Dissertation Award committee, David Brake, Caroline Haythornthwaite, and Erika Pearson.
