Announcing the 2025 Lyman Recipients
BCNM is excited to announce Eda Er (Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition) and Meg Everett (Ph.D. candidate in the Learning Sciences and Human Development) have been awarded this year’s 2025 Peter Lyman Fellowship!
The Peter Lyman Graduate Fellowship in new media, established in the memory of esteemed UC Berkeley Professor Peter Lyman, provides a stipend to a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate to support the writing of his or her Ph.D. dissertation on a topic related to new media. The fellowship is supported by donations from Professor Barrie Thorne, Sage Publications and many individual friends and faculty.
Eda Er’s dissertation, Fluid Narratives, reimagines the Turkish art of Ebru (marbling) as a medium for contemporary composition, performance, and feminist storytelling. Originating in Central Asia and later flourishing in the Ottoman-Turkish tradition, Ebru became an essential element of bookbinding and calligraphy, recognized for its intricate, floating pigment designs. Traditionally preserved and innovated upon by women, its fluid nature becomes a metaphor for cultural memory, resilience, and systemic critique.
Through multimedia compositions and interactive installations, the project translates marbling patterns into sonic and visual elements using Max/MSP, TouchDesigner, and custom algorithms. Exploring themes of identity, belonging, and feminist resistance, it invites audiences to engage with marbling as a multisensory experience.
Grounded in feminist theory, cultural studies, and new media, Fluid Narratives challenges Eurocentric narratives and reinterprets traditional art forms to address gender equity, cultural displacement, and historical preservation.
Meg Everett's dissertation investigates the complex interplay between social media platforms and formal schooling environments, with a particular focus on TikTok as an illustrative case of how digital technologies transform school boundaries and relationships. Coupling socio-technical perspectives with media literacy frameworks, her work consists of a trio of qualitative studies that explore the dialectic between school environments and social media to understand how teachers, students, and researchers navigate, make meaning, and exercise agency within an increasingly platform-mediated society.
The first study examines how viral K-12 teachers on TikTok perceived their online popularity as reshaping classroom dynamics and student relationships, drawing from seven semi-structured interviews that revealed informal mentorship practices around social media use. The second study employs educational design-based research to analyze how personal reflection and student-driven inquiry in a media literacy course can support increased feelings of individual and collective digital agency. The final study uses virtual ethnography to investigate how TikTok's platform infrastructure and policies mediate the visibility of youth-created school content and the methodological challenges for studying it.
Her dissertation project moves beyond overly simplistic views of social media in schools as purely beneficial, harmful, or incompatible with formal educational settings. Instead, it illuminates the various and often contradictory ways that platform dynamics already shape educational experiences in order to identify possibilities for more empowering engagement. These possibilities include strengthening relationships between teachers and students, utilizing curriculum and instruction to build students' sense of control and create change, and offering methodological insights for studying youth practices on social media.