Keywords
digital activism, technology activism and hacktivism
open source cultures
Internet and new media futures
new media governance
qualitative methods in and for policy research
Biography
I am currently an LSE Fellow in Media and Communication. Before arriving at the LSE in 2010, I was an SSHRC postdoctoral research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, where I studied grassroots technology development and digital advocacy and their impact on new media technologies and policies. I have a PhD from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada (2008), where I conducted research on community wireless networks as forms of technical activism that created new mediated communities and publics. One of the case studies from this thesis won the American Sociological Association's Communication Technology section's Best Student paper prize in 2008. The PhD was fully funded by an SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship. I have an MA degree in Communications and Culture from York University in Toronto, Canada (2006), which was supported by the Government of Ontario and the Ted and Loretta Rogers Foundation. For this degree, I conducted an online and offline ethnography of an internet cafe. My Bachelor of Arts and Science (2000) is from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada and was awarded summa cum laude. For a brief period in the early 2000s, I worked in television and new media production.
Research Interests
My research examines the history and future of 'openness' within new media. Broadly, I am interested in how openness in architecture and policy are negotiated by a range of actors including amateurs and 'contributors'. Specifically, I study open-source cultures including community wireless networks, free software advocates and people interested in open sourcing knowledge including hardware design.
I am interested in the ways that non-commercial production of communications technology construct alternatives that engage with the different material and symbolic affordances of media. These affordances are also often embedded in political economic structures that highlight the tension between control and freedom. For example, compared with the 'open' internet, mobile devices employ more 'closed' design features. And as the internet becomes more ubiquitous, decisions about its function are often more difficult for citizens and activists to influence. Some questions that animate my work include: How do the capacities afforded by new technologies change the way we imagine the relationships between emergent organizations and established institutions? How do normative values like freedom and openness get negotiated in new media contexts? How do activists contribute to media policy and governance decisions? What might our mediated futures look like?
To investigate these questions, I focus on two strands: one concerns the way that opening the participation in design of and deliberation about new technologies can change how policy and governance decisions are made. A second strand concentrates more closely on the political economy of 'open' movements, including the ways that new media are 'opened' and 'enclosed in different ways. Beginning in December 2011 I am conducting work on open-source movements and the future of Internet governance as part of a European Framework 7 research project, the European Network of Excellence on Internet Science.
Policy Research and Impact
Both my academic and policy research have had broad applications. In my work I have examined internet governance and media issues including barriers to internet access, best (and worst) practices of community wireless networks, the social and economic implications of these networks, Net Neutrality decision-making in the US and the UK and funding models for internet access in rural and remote areas. My research has directly contributed to decisions made by the United States Federal Communication Commission, the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs and numerous recommendations made by organizations such as the New America Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Open Rights Group. I am a member of the Open Rights Group advisory council and a member of the Open Spectrum Alliance, an organization that researches and advocates on public access to radio spectrum.
I blog at http://www.alisonpowell.ca| and contribute occasional thoughts on Internet freedom and openness to the LSE Media Policy Project blog. Outside of academia I occasionally collaborate on new media art projects.
Publications
Peer-reviewed Journal Articles
Powell, Alison (2011) "Metaphors, Models and Communicative Spaces: Designing local wireless infrastructure" Canadian Journal of Communication.
Techatassanasoontorn , Angsana, Andrea Tapia and Alison Powell (forthcoming 2011) "Learning Processes in Municipal Broadband Projects: An absorptive capacity perspective" Telecommunications Policy. Online preprint available with DOI: doi:10.1016/j.telpol.2010.06.001|
Powell, Alison, Amelia Bryne and Dharma Dailey (forthcoming 2010) "The Necessary Internet: Digital inclusion insights from low-income Americans" Policy & Internet (2)2.
Tapia, Andrea, Alison Powell and Julio Ortiz (2009) "Reforming Policy to Promote Local Broadband Networks" Journal of Communication Inquiry. 354-375.
Powell, Alison (2008) "WiFi Publics: Producing Community and Technology." Information, Communication, and Society (8) 1068-1088.
Peddle, Katrina, Alison Powell and Leslie Regan shade (2008) "Bringing Feminist Perspectives into Community Informatics" Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal.
Powell, Alison (2007) "An Ecology of Public Internet Access: Exploring contextual internet access in an urban community" Electronic Journal of Communication: Special Issue on Communicative Ecologies 17 (1-2) Available at: http://www.cios.org/www/ejc/v17n12.htm#une|
Powell, Alison and Leslie Regan Shade (2006) "Going Wi-Fi in Canada: Community and municipal initiatives" Government Information Quarterly (23) 3-4, 381-403. Available at DOI: doi:10.1016/j.giq.2006.09.001 |
Selected Book Chapters
Powell, Alison (forthcoming 2011) "WiFi Publics: Defining community and technology at Montreal's Ile Sans Fil" in Canadian Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking, edited by Andrew Clement, Michael Gurstein, and Graham Longford. Edmonton: University of Athabasca Press.
Powell, Alison and Dharma Dailey (2010) "Towards a Taxonomy for Public Interest Communications Research" In Communications Research in Action: Scholar-Activist Collaborations for a Democratic Public Sphere, edited by Phil Napoli and Minna Aslama. New York: Fordham University Press.
Powell, Alison (2010) "Wi-Fi, Resistance, and Making Infrastructure Visible" in The Wireless Spectrum: The Politics, Practices and Poetics of Mobile Communication, edited by Michael Longford, Barbara Crow and Kimberly Sawchuk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Longford, Graham, Diane Dechief, Alison Powell and Kenneth Werbin (2008) "Enabling Communities in the Networked City: ICTs and Civic Participation Among Immigrants and Youth in Urban Canada" In Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the physical and electronic city. Edited by Alessandro Aurigi and Fiorello De Cindio. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing.
Powell, Alison (2007) "Île Sans Fil: rassemblement numérique" [translated by Catherine Zekri] in L'action communautaire à l'ère du numérique. by Serge Proulx, Stéphane Couture, and Julien Rueff. Laval, QC: Presses Universitaires du Québec.
Powell, Alison (2005) "E-Life and Real Life: On- and off-line social life in an Internet Café". Association of Internet Researchers Research Annual no. 2. edited by Mia Consalvo and Matthew Allen. 135-148.
Reports
Dailey, Dharma, Amelia Bryne, Alison Powell, Joe Karaganis and Jaewon Chung (2010) Broadband Adoption in Low Income Communities. with Social Science Research Council. Brooklyn, NY. Available at: http://webarchive.ssrc.org/pdfs/Broadband_Adoption_v1.1.pdf|
Powell, Alison and Michael Hills (2010) Child Protection and Free Speech: Mapping the Territory. with Michael Hills. Oxford Internet Institute Discussion Forum Paper 17. Oxford, UK. Available at: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/publications/FD17.pdf|
Forlano, Laura and Alison Powell (2009) Community Wireless Networking Projects Worldwide. [shared authorship] New America Foundation Report. Washington DC. Excerpted online at the OpenWaves book project: http://www.openwaves.ws/chapters.htm|
Review Essays and Book Reviews
Powell, Alison (forthcoming 2010) Method, Methodology and New Media: Global Technography by Grant Kien, and Online Interviewing by Nalita James and Hugh Busher New Media and Society
Powell, Alison (2005) "Book Review: Community in the Digital Age: Philosophy and Practice" by Andrew Feenberg and Darin Barney. New Media and Society (4): 589-591.
Powell, Alison (2005) "Book Review: The Network Society" by Darin Barney. Resource Centre for Cyberculture Studies, April 2005. Available at: http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs/bookinfo.asp?ReviewID=312&BookID=265|
Contact
Dr. Alison Powell
Department of Media and Communications
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE
Tel: +44 (0) 20
Fax: +44 (0) 20
Room S119d
Email: a.powell@lse.ac.uk|.