{"id":41447,"date":"2025-02-19T14:06:35","date_gmt":"2025-02-19T19:06:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/?post_type=profile&#038;p=41447"},"modified":"2025-10-15T14:53:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T18:53:22","slug":"joan-donovan","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/profile\/joan-donovan\/","title":{"rendered":"Joan Donovan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Joan Donovan is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media Studies, focusing on media manipulation, sociology of knowledge and expertise, and networked social movements. She coauthored a book called, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomsbury.com\/us\/meme-wars-9781635578638\/\">Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America<\/a>, which analyzes how meme culture became an important political communication strategy bridging social movements with contemporary political parties from Occupy to the insurrection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Donovan\u2019s academic research can be found in academic peer-reviewed journals such as Social Studies of Science, Social Media + Society, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Information, Communication &amp; Society, and Online Information Review. Her contributions can also be found in the books, Data Science Landscape: Towards Research Standards and Protocols and Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives. Dr. Donovan\u2019s public scholarship has been showcased in a wide array of media mainstream outlets, including MIT Technology Review, NPR, Washington Post, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Formerly, Dr. Donovan was the Research Director of the Harvard Kennedy School\u2019s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy, where I directed the Technology and Social Change Research Project. Our team researched <a href=\"https:\/\/mediamanipulation.org\/\">media manipulation, disinformation, and adversarial media movements<\/a>. She was previously the Research Lead for Data &amp; Society\u2019s Media Manipulation Initiative, which mapped how interest groups, governments, political operatives, corporations, and others use the internet and media to disrupt social institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Donovan completed my PhD in Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego in 2015, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, where she studied white supremacists\u2019 use of DNA ancestry tests, social movements, and technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24086,"template":"","interest":[],"discipline-type":[1428,1424],"profile-type":[1463],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/41447"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24086"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/41447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41458,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/41447\/revisions\/41458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"interest","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/interest?post=41447"},{"taxonomy":"discipline-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/discipline-type?post=41447"},{"taxonomy":"profile-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile-type?post=41447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}