My research experience encompasses themes ranging from the political implications of immersive media environments and the use of biometric technologies in immigration management to the dynamics of online identity and the mediated construction of reality.
Anthropological Foresight
At L’Atelier BNP Paribas, I designed and directed research on the social and cultural implications of emerging technologies. My role bridged research direction, project management, and advocacy for the field of digital anthropology. Aside from the production of thematic content for L’Atelier’s Insights blog and leadership roles on a number of projects, as director of L’Atelier’s Digital Anthropology stream, I also spearheaded the development of a future-oriented research agenda blending qualitative, quantitative, computational, and foresight techniques.
Voices of Outrage
My doctoral research explored the role of online partisan media in contemporary American politics and society, with an empirical focus on “below-the-line” commentary on a conservative news and opinion website during the 2016 US presidential election. You can read my thesis via LSE Theses Online. My current scholarship, as an LSE Visiting Fellow, builds on my doctoral research to examine broader questions of how communication technologies are being used to develop new articulations of politics and identity, particularly with respect to the production and circulation of user-generated content, as well as the influence of platforms and algorithms in the mediation of partisanship.
Digital Queer Discourse
My earlier research focused on the dynamics of identity in the context of online social networks. My masters thesis was based on an 18-month digital ethnography that took a social network targeted at the LGBTQIA+ community as a field site. I explored how modes of self representation emerge within computer mediated discourse settings, situating this with respect to a market for queer proximity in which styles of talk and forms of personhood become codified as morally-loaded markers of difference. You can read more about my research in this special issue of the Irish Journal of Anthropology.
Media and Communications
Aside from my own research interests, I have extensive experience contributing to research on a broad range of topics in the fields of anthropology and media. I worked as a Research Officer on Prof Terhi Rantanen’s LSE KEI-funded project, The Future of National News Agencies in Europe, securing additional funding from the British Academy. I also spent two years as a Research Assistant to Prof Nick Couldry in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.
The Social Life of Technology
Other topics on which I have contributed research expertise and guidance include: British media representations of 5G technologies, Arab transitional media, discourses of and about Youth Climate Strike, the global incidence and consequences of cyberbullying, the use of biometric technology in French immigration management, and the development of large-group evaluation techniques for anthropology undergraduates.
You can read about my research experience in greater detail in a series of brief case studies.
My Research
Digital Queer Discourse
Occasional Research
The Future of National News Agencies in Europe
Cyberbullying: Incidence, Trends, and Consequences
All Party Parliamentary Group on a Better Brexit for Young People
CATCH-EyoU: Constructing AcTive CitizensHip with European Youth
The Mediated Construction of Reality
Reflexive Large-Group Evaluation for Anthropology
Biometric Technologies in French Immigration Management
Anthony P Kelly, PhD 