Jennifer Earl is a Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. She was a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB, from Assistant to Full, 2002-2011) and the University of Arizona (Full, 2012-2023) before joining the University of Delaware. She is Director Emerita of the Center for Information Technology and Society and Director Emerita of the Technology and Society PhD Emphasis, both at UCSB. Her research, writing, and outreach focuses on understanding levers and barriers to social and political change and activism by blending research on social movement repression, digital and social media usage and impacts, and young people’s political participation.
With expertise in social movements, the sociology of law, and digital and social media, she is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for research from 2006-2011 on Web activism and has received over 1.25 million dollars in grant funding since earning her PhD. She was also a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics. She has published widely, including an MIT Press book entitled Digitally Enabled Social Change, which examines how the use of Internet affordances are reshaping the basic dynamics of protest online and was awarded an Honorable Mention for the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association’s Book Award in 2013. She was inducted in 2016 to the Sociological Research Association, an honorary association for sociological researchers. She is also the recipient of a university-award for excellence in undergraduate research mentoring in 2010-2011 and another university-wide award for the most outstanding assistant professor on her campus in 2005-2006.
There are lots of cool tools embedded within the site– please explore. Highlights include an early bibliography on Internet Activism, links (from the Youth Activism Project) to a crowd-sourced bibliography on social movement outcomes, and a treasure trove of Stata programming help.