Akselrad uses historical and ethnographic methods to examine how media affect the sensemaking of individuals inside expansive bureaucratic institutions, information systems, and military infrastructures.
Doctoral Students — Journalism, Media and Culture
Sanna Ali
Ali is interested in politics of platforms and the civic good – specifically, she studies privatization of digitally-supported infrastructure and its implications on inequalities of access and distribution.
Caitlin Burke
Burke is interested in user experience design, design ethics, and human-computer interaction.
Andrew Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald’s work is situated at the intersection of critical political economy of communication, critical audience studies, and media ethics. His dissertation explores the impacts of datafication and social media platforms on the circulation and public reception of mediatized terrorism, and the transnational construction of violence, political discourses, and social action.
Jeffrey Nagy
Nagy’s current research focuses on exchanges between computing and the behavioral sciences in the post-war period and on how those exchanges have shaped the contemporary digital ecosystem.
Reagan Ross
Reagan is interested in the intersections of race, gender, and new media and technology. She is also interested in understanding how new technology might be used to disrupt anti-Black racism.
Morgan Weiland
Morgan N. Weiland is the Executive Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, where she received her JD in 2015. She is in the process of completing the first joint degree program between SLS and Stanford’s Communication Department, where she is a PhD candidate. Her dissertation investigates the structural role of speech platforms like Facebook and Twitter in the public sphere to understand what responsibilities these companies have to the public, and what policies ought to be enacted to ensure both free expression and accountability.
Weiland was a Lecturer in Law at SLS during the 2017-18 academic year, when she developed and taught a new course about platforms, law, and ethics with Professor Barbara van Schewick. She is also a Graduate Fellow at SLS’s Center for Internet & Society. She clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals during the 2018-19 term. She is admitted to the California Bar.
