Joan Donovan is the director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy’s Shorenstein Center. She was until December 2018 at Data and Society as the project lead on media manipulation.

After completing her PhD in Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, where she researched white supremacists’ use of DNA ancestry tests, social movements, and technology. For several years, Joan has conducted action research with different networked social movements in order to map and improve the communication infrastructures built by protesters. In her role as a participant, she identifies information bottlenecks, decodes algorithmic behavior, and connects organizations with other like-minded networks.

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