Jessica Yarin Robinson

Research interests

Jessica Robinson researches cross-border online political participation, with a focus on user practices in the Scandinavian region. She is interested in how – and if – the potential globality of the web actually manifests in online interactions and what the nature of these interactions means for the traditional definition of the public sphere. Questions driving her work include:

• How do social media users engage with events and political issues originating outside their immediate national sphere?
• What political identities are activated by these cosmopolitan forms of political participation?
• To what degree are flows of misinformation and "echo chambers" transnational phenomena?

Background

Jessica was a journalist for NPR stations in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States from 2005 to 2015, specializing in political, economic, and demographic developments in rural areas and earning awards for her investigative work. Before beginning her PhD work, she worked for the peer-reviewed Journal of Media Innovations and was editorial assistant on the book Contesting Religion: The Media Dynamics of Cultural Conflicts in Scandinavia (De Gruyter, 2018). In 2016, Jessica researched patterns of media use in the Nordic countries for an updated digital companion to the book The Media Welfare State (University of Michigan Press, 2014).
 

On Twitter: @jessixarobinson