2023-2025 EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
President: Nicholas John
Nicholas John is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of The Age of Sharing (Polity, 2016), which in 2017 was awarded the Nancy Baym Book Award by AoIR. His current work focuses mainly on unfriending and other forms of digital tie breaking. He is @Nik@aoir.social on Mastodon, and his web presence is nicholasjohn.huji.ac.il.
Vice President: Sarah T. Roberts
Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. is an associate professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies), specializing in Internet and social media policy, infrastructure, politics and culture, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Informed by feminist Science and Technology Studies perspectives, Roberts is keenly interested in the way power, geopolitics and economics play out on and via the internet, reproducing, reifying and exacerbating global inequities and social injustice. Roberts researches information work and workers, and is a leading global authority on “commercial content moderation,” the term she coined to describe the work of those responsible for making sure media content posted to major commercial social platforms t within legal, ethical, and the site’s own guidelines and standards. She is frequently consulted on matters of policy, worker welfare, and governance related to content moderation issues and the broader social media landscape.
Immediate Past President: Tama Leaver
Treasurer: Sam Srauy
I’m an Associate Professor of Communication in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University in Michigan. My research examines race, video games, and the political economy of the video game industry. While my research investigates how race and racism is embedded in videogame culture, I don’t investigate videogame producers or titles, per se. Rather, my work focuses on the larger production ecosystem and how — even in the absence of intention — racism is maintained. My work has appeared in Social Media + Society, First Mondays, Games and Culture, and Television and New Media. I teach a wide variety of courses in the department. However, I specialize in teaching media production.
Secretary: Gabriel Pereira
Gabriel Pereira is an Independent Research Fund Denmark International Postdoc, based as a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK). He is an incoming Assistant Professor in AI and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on critical studies of data, algorithms, and digital infrastructures, particularly those of computer vision. He is @gabrielopereira@aoir.social on Mastodon and his web presence is www.gabrielpereira.net.
Graduate Student Representative: Tom Divon
Tom Divon is a PhD student focusing on digital culture, platform affordances, and user-generated content. His work is particularly focused on TikTok’s sociopolitical subcultures and their potential for education in three areas: (1) TikTok users’ engagement with Holocaust commemoration and education, (2) TikTok users’ performative combat against hate speech, and (3) TikTok users’ memetic participation in nationalism-driven conflicts, with a focus on Palestinian resistance. Furthermore, Divon is a key regional leader for the Middle East within the “TikTok Cultures Research Network.” He actively advocates for strengthening creator culture in the Middle East, striving to alleviate the precarity faced by content creators and promote improved platform-user interactions spanning diverse geographical regions. Web https://tomdivon.com/; Twitter https://twitter.com/TomDivon; Mastodon https://aoir.social/@TomDivon
Open Seat: Sophie Bishop
Dr Sophie Bishop is an Associate Professor in Media and Communications at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on promotional cultures on social media platforms, through the lens of feminist political economy. Her work has been published in journals such as the Sociological Review, Social Media + Society, New Media & Society, Communication, Culture and Critique and Feminist Media Studies. Sophie was the Specialist Advisor to the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into Influencer Culture (2022) and has contributed to EU Policy on the impact of influencers on advertising and consumer protection. She is a member of the European Research Council funded ‘HumanAds’ project, in addition to PI on the British Academy funded project ‘Advertorial Regulation and Influencer Cultures’. Her new research looks at the ways influencer cultures have shaped cultural industries – her book ‘Influencer Creep’ is under contract at the University of California Press.
Open Seat: Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández
Dr Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the Queensland University of Technology, member of the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), and ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellow (2023-2026). Her research focuses on social media cultures, platform governance, online harms and algorithmic systems. For her DECRA project, she examines harmful humour’s impact on women’s wellbeing online, how it is poorly managed by social media platforms and has not been integrated into online safety regulation and policy. She is co-author of a forthcoming book on WhatsApp (Polity, with Amelia Johns and Emma Baulch).
Open Seat: Job Mwaura
Dr Job Mwaura is a Research Associate at the Wits Centre for Journalism, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He holds a PhD in Media Studies from the same university. Prior to this, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town, in the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA). He actively researches and publishes on digital media in Africa, African studies, digital cultures, and the intersection of emerging technologies and society. Dr Mwaura has been an active part of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) since 2017.
