News/Research

Jen Schradie on The Debate

16 Jul, 2019

Jen Schradie on The Debate

Check out alum Jen Schradie on France 24 discussing whether Democrats will be able to mobilize their base on the internet for 2020!

Jen Schradie recently published The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives (Harvard University Press, 2019), which shows that money and organizational sophistication influence politics online as much as off, and casts doubt on the democratizing power of digital activism.

Jen is an Assistant Professor at the Observatoire sociologique du changement (OSC) at Sciences Po in Paris. Previously, she was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, based at the Toulouse School of Economics, as well as at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société, Université de Toulouse. Her broad research agenda is to interrogate digital democracy claims with empirical data. Despite recent panic about digital threats to democracy, many theorists have still suggested that the Internet can enable a more participatory, pluralist society, but her research challenges these claims, spanning three areas: the digital divide, digital activism, and digital labor. Schradie has found that inequalities, ideologies, and institutions shape participation in our new information society.