Ben French

I am a first year PhD Candidate working to explore the role of social media in forming selves and places. Based in New York City, my project considers how social media usage may be a form of ethical-work through both in-person and online fieldwork. 

My resarch aims to move away from current considerations of social media in digital anthropology which look at the digital and physical, instead seeing social media as a complicated assemblage of contested realms, layered onto the 'meatspace'.

Email: [email protected]

Disciplinary

• Social media practices, Influencers and personal data
• Dichotomies between physical/digital
• Self-formation and performativity
• The Good Life, ethical work and the ethcial self
• Place-making
• Urban anthropology

Methodological
My methodoloigcal interests lie mostly in developing new ethnographic research methods to better understand digital practices and the pullulation of digital into the 'meatspace'. These methods range across:

• Graphic Anthropology
• Digital methods
• Methods for studying up/Studying sideways

Born and raised in Manchester, UK- I began to study Anthropology as an Undergraduate at Durham University, where I focussed largely on Queer Anthropology, completing a dissertation titled 'Coz Marsha Said So: How Queer Exemplars Help Create New Histories and Old Futures'. 

After completing my undergraduate degree I took a year away from accademia, working in social media, gaining practical skills and experience in the area I now research, as well as co-creating an independent magazine now sold across Europe. In 2023 I returned to Anthropology, studying a Masters in Anthropological Research at the University of Manchester, developing the project I am now pursuing as a PhD Candidate, having sucessfully gained funding from the UKRI by way of the  NWSSDTP. 

PhD and Masters:
Lead Supervisor: Jolynna Sinanan
Co-Supervisor: Andrew Irving

Undergraduate:
Elizabeth Kirtsoglou