Rebekah Larsen is a media sociologist, holding a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on understudied media environments, especially at the intersection of rurality, religion, and radio. Her current work is centered on the Utah media ecosystem as a case study—mapping actors, institutions, technologies, identities, and cultural/ideological influences. As a research associate at CGHR, Rebekah’s work connects with multiple dimensions of human rights and democratic practice in the digital age. Her doctoral dissertation was recognized in 2022 by the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) for its ‘implications for policy debates along the North-South divide’; she used mixed methods to explore framing of specific data privacy measures as both ‘activist tools’ for marginalized groups but also as ‘exclusionary measures’. Publications and presentations from her postdoctoral work have variously addressed leaked personal data from platform whistleblowers; tradeoffs in platform-journalist partnerships; and changes in the growing fact-checking field around publics and technologies.
Rebekah has been a postdoctoral fellow with an international, interdisciplinary team of journalism scholars, working to understand how newsrooms approach misinformation around elections. She was also a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, as well as a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Internet Society Project. Most recently, she was awarded a fellowship grant through the EU’s Marie Curie programme, where she has been based at the University of Copenhagen.
In 2025, she will be joining MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department as an assistant professor. You can read more about her work, past and present, on her website.
