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, networks, technologies, digital identities, and cultural/ideological influences. As a research associate at CGHR, Rebekah’s work has touched on 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 publicsand technologies.
From 2021 – 2023, Rebekah was a postdoctoral fellow on an international, interdisciplinary team of journalism scholars, working to understand how newsrooms approach misinformation around elections. Concurrently, she was a postdoctoral associate and lecturer at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department, teaching and researching through August 2023. Beginning in September 2023, she will be 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. She was also recently awarded a fellowship grant through the EU’s Marie Curie programme, which she will take up at the University of Copenhagen beginning summer 2024.
You can read more about her work, past and present, on her website.
