Zoe Glatt

About

Zoë Glatt is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Sociotechnical Systems at Microsoft Research New England. She is a digital anthropologist and feminist media scholar with interests in platformised creative industries and labour, social media and influencer cultures, and digital ethnographic methods. Her current research interrogates the ways in which structural inequalities are exacerbated, co-opted and resisted in platform environments. During her time at Microsoft she will be working on her first monograph, Demonetised: Inequality, Co-option and Resistance in the Influencer Industry.

Zoë received her PhD in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics (2023), and holds an MA Digital Media from Goldsmiths University (2017) and a BA Social Anthropology from SOAS (2013). Her PhD thesis was a long-term ethnographic study of the London influencer industry (2017-2023) that explored the exacerbation of conditions of precarity and inequality for cultural workers in platformised environments. This research involved conducting fieldwork offline at industry and community events and online across a multitude of social media platforms, interviews with content creators, and autoethnographic research in the form of becoming a YouTuber herself (opens in new tab).

She is the Co-Founder of The Digital Ethnography Collective (opens in new tab), an interdisciplinary group exploring the intersections of digital culture and ethnographic methods, and is regularly interviewed as a social media expert for outlets such as Wired, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Time, and Vice. Previously, she held roles as the Graduate Student Representative for the Association of Internet Researchers (2019-2021), Managing Editor of the ICA journal Communication, Culture & Critique (2018-2021) and Associate Lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths University. She manages two widely used collaborative readings lists, on Digital Ethnography (opens in new tab) and Influencer Industries & Creator Culture (opens in new tab).

For further information and links to her publications and reading lists, visit Zoë’s website: www.zoeglatt.com (opens in new tab)