danah boyd

danah boyd
Social Media Researcher, Microsoft Research New England
Fellow, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society

danah boyd’s research investigates everyday practices involving social media, with specific attention to youth engagement. She received her doctorate in 2008 from the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and recently co-authored Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Dr. boyd is currently co-directing the Youth and Media Policy Working Group, funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

She blogs at http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ and tweets at @zephoria.

Dr. boyd’s dissertation project Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics analyzes on how American youth use networked publics for sociable purposes. She examined the role that social network sites like MySpace and Facebook play in everyday teen interactions and social relations. She was interested in how mediated environments alter the structural conditions in which teens operate, forcing them to manage complex dynamics like interacting before invisible audiences, managing context collisions, and negotiating the convergence of public and private life. This work was funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a broader grant on digital youth and informal learning. The findings of the broader team are documented in Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media.

At the Berkman Center, danah co-directed the Internet Safety Technical Task Force with John Palfrey and Dena Sacco to work with companies and non-profits to identify potential technical solutions for keeping children safe online. This Task Force was formed by the U.S. Attorneys General and MySpace and is being organized by the Berkman Center. Currently, danah is co-directing the Youth Media and Policy Working Group with John Palfrey and Urs Gasser; this project is funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

Dr. boyd is also an associate fellow at Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society. She is on the board of the New Media Consortium. She was a Commissioner on the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

Dr. boyd received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown University and a master’s degree in sociable media from MIT Media Lab. She has worked as an ethnographer and social media researcher for various corporations, including Intel, Tribe.net, Google, and Yahoo! She also created and managed a large online community for V-Day, a non-profit organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide. She has advised numerous other companies, sits on corporate, education, conference, and non-profit advisory boards, and regularly speaks at a wide variety of conferences and events.