About
Elisabetta Ferrari’s research addresses the social and political implications of digital technologies, with an emphasis on activism and social movements. Taking a critical, qualitative and comparative approach, her work interrogates how people make sense of the politics of digital technologies in relation to social justice. Her book project examines how contemporary leftist activist groups in Italy, Hungary and the United States constructed their own “technological imaginaries” to appropriate, negotiate or challenge Silicon Valley’s dominant techno-optimist ideas. She developed an innovative drawing-based research method, the visual focus group, which seeks to facilitate conversations about the politics of technology; Ferrari aims to employ this method to encourage civil society actors to collectively imagine better digital technologies.
Ferrari has published her research in academic journals such as New Media & Society, Media, Culture & Society and Communication, Culture & Critique, presented at international conferences in the field of Media and Communication, and received competitive research funding.
Prior to joining the DSI, Ferrari was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in August 2019. She also holds an MA in Political Science from Central European University in Hungary.
