Dr. Zeyno Ustun is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Digital Media & Film at St. Lawrence University. She came to SLU after her 2019-2021 Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Media at Risk in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Sociology at the New School for Social Research in 2019. Ustun earned her first Master’s degree in Sociology at Bogaziçi University, with the thesis titled Desire of the Impossible; A Cultural Reading of Fantastic Cinema and a second M.A. in Sociology at the New School for Social Research allowing her to combine her changing areas of focus later in her graduate career. Her areas of research align at the intersection of traditional media and critical media studies, global media infrastructures, networked social movements, and Internet law with a particular focus on the Global South. She is interested in how power operates over decentralized networks, focusing on the tension between the universal-technical and local-legal codes that impacted the conditions of distributed mediation in the cases like Gezi Movement, a networked movement took place in 2013 in Turkey that she closely studied. Utilizing a mixed method approach, she calls cartographic ethnography, she creates digital archives that document the historical and social processes of emerging media and changing cultural meaning around technologies. Ustun contributed to Graph Commons, a platform for mapping, analyzing and sharing data-networks between the years 2011-2019, and continues to use the tool in her academic and activist work.
