Editors

Ethnography Matters is managed and run by a group of volunteer editors who are passionate about ethnography.

Current Editors

Morgan G. Ames @morgangames draws on training in anthropology, communication, and computer science to research the ways we make sense of new technologies in our everyday lives. Her current research focuses on the role of stories and mythologies in the design and use of technology. She is investigating the social meanings of the One Laptop Per Child project, tracing its intellectual history at MIT and assessing its deployments across the Americas. Morgan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing at UC Irvine.

She has a BA in computer science and a MS in Information Science from UC Berkeley, and finished her PhD in communication (minoring in anthropology) in 2013 at Stanford University, where her dissertation received the Nathan Maccoby Outstanding Dissertation Award.

Morgan joined Ethnography Matters in 2014 after being a guest contributor and editor in 2013. You can find her online at http://morganya.org. Read more Ethnography Matters posts from Morgan.

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Rachelle Annechino @surrogatekey is an Associate Research Scientist at the Prevention Research Center at PIRE, where she works on ethnographically-oriented mixed methods projects focused on substance use and health inequity in the US.

She is also Director of Digital Media Projects at the Center for Critical Public Health (CCPH), a newly formed research center that takes a critical perspective on public health narratives, with an aim to integrate multiple voices in conversations about health and power through digital storytelling and engagement. A graduate of the School of Information at UC Berkeley, she is interested in too many things.

Rachelle is one of the founding editors of Ethnography Matters. Read more Ethnography Matters posts from Rachelle.

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Heather Ford @hfordsa is a DPhil student and a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute where she is studying how Wikipedians write history as it happens. Before that she was an ethnographer at Ushahidi  where she studied how online communities understand and perform verification or confirmation of reports contributed by the “crowd”. She has worked for non-profit organisations in the field of Internet rights and intellectual property reform including iCommons, Creative Commons, the Association for Progressive Communications, Privacy International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a Google Policy Intern, and has consulted for numerous foundations and corporations in the arena of online communications and development.

She did her Master’s at the UC Berkeley School of Information where she explored how to design for privacy-aware online educational systems.  At night she dreams about writing books and finding time to draw. Her home blog is at hblog.org.

Ethnography Matters is Heather’s brainchild! Read more Ethnography Matters posts from Heather.

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Tricia Wang @triciawang is a global tech ethnographer transforming research in organizations. She advises students, designers, organizations, and corporations on utilizing Digital Age ethnographic research methods to improve strategy, policy, services, and products. Her research interests lie at the intersection of technology and culture—the investigation of how social media and the internet affect identity-making, trust formation, and collective action. Through extensive fieldwork in China and Latin America, she has developed expertise on digital communities in emerging economies, leading to the formulation of an innovative sociological  framework for understanding user interactions online.

Her research has been featured in The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Fast Company, Makeshift, and Wired. She has worked with Fortune 500 companies including Nokia and GE and numerous institutions from the UN to NASA. She is a visiting scholar at New York University’s Information Telecommunication Program. She is also an advisory board member of Rev Arts in New York City. She is currently writing a book about the internet in China as an expressive space in which users uniquely shape their identities in an otherwise rigid society, a phenomenon she calls “the Elastic Self”.

Tricia is one of the founding editors of Ethnography Matters. Read more Ethnography Matters posts from Tricia.

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Alumni

Jenna Burrell @jennaburrell is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Her book Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana was recently published by the MIT Press. Before pursuing her PhD she was an Application Concept Developer in the People and Practices Research Group at Intel Corporation. Her interests span many research topics including theories of materiality, user agency, transnationalism, post-colonial relations, digital representation, and ICTs in Africa. Her personal website is here.

Jenna is one of the founding editors of Ethnography Matters and is now a regular contributor. Read more Ethnography Matters posts from Jenna.

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Nicolas Nova @nicolasnova is a consultant and researcher at the Near Future Laboratory. He undertakes field studies to inform and evaluate the creation of innovative products and services. His work is about exploring and understanding people’s needs, motivations and contexts to map new design opportunities and help designers and engineers. Nicolas applies this in the domains of video games, mobile and location-based media as well as networked objects/robots.

He also teaches user research in interaction design at HEAD-Geneva and ENSCI-Les Ateliers in Paris. He holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL, Switzerland). In his free time, he collects video game controllers and peculiar interfaces dug up in flea markets here and there. He blogs at Pasta & Vinegar.

Read more Ethnography Matters posts from Nicolas.