April - Courtney T. Wittekind
Please join me in congratulating Courtney T. Wittekind, assistant professor of anthropology, on being awarded a $75,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant for her project Influencing the Revolution: Social Media and Digital Fundraising in the United States and Myanmar, through the NEH’s Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities (DOT) program.
Influencing the Revolution is an ethnographic study of the growing importance of digital technology in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution, explored from the vantage point of transnational fundraising networks active on social media. Digital and in-person research will trace flows of time, labor, and money exchanged through Facebook, the primary platform connecting refugees and migrants in the US to revolutionary actors abroad. While popular reporting on digital activism has asserted social media’s universal consequences, by applying a humanities lens to transnational fundraising, Influencing the Revolution will trace the contradictory effects that emerge when a democratic movement confronts social media’s profit-generating capacity.
NEH's DOT program supports research that examines technology and its relationship to society through the lens of the humanities with a focus on the dangers and/or opportunities presented by technology.
Congratulations, Professor Wittekind!
David A. Reingold
Senior Vice President for Policy Planning
Justin S. Morrill Dean of Liberal Arts
Professor of Sociology