Jen Schradie

After a career as a documentary filmmaker, Jen Schradie received her PhD from the University of California (Sociology Department), and the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Her research areas span the digital divide, digital activism, and digital labor. With a sociological lens, her research challenges claims of either utopic digital democracy or dystopic internet villains.  Schradie’s research is at the intersection of stratification and inequality, communication media and technology, labor and social movements, as well as political sociology and public policy.

She finds that societal structures of class inequality, bureaucratic institutions, and political ideology can all drive internet use. Her current comparative project focuses on gender and class differences in the start-up economy in France and the U.S., and another examines online hate speech against Muslims. Incorporating qualitative and quantitative methods with both online and offline data, Schradie contextualizes disparities and variation of participation in digital society.