About
Isis Hjorth is a Researcher at the OII. She is a cultural sociologist, who specialises in analysing emerging practices associated with networked technologies. She completed her AHRC-funded DPhil (PhD) at the OII in January 2014. Her thesis “Networked Cultural Production: Filmmaking in the Wreckamovie Community” was an ethnographic study of four crowdsourced feature films, tackling the emergence of distributed collaborative production models spanning the boundaries between non-market and market-orientated production. Grounded in critical sociological theory, it examined the division of labour, and theorized the dynamics of the various forms of capital enabling the realisation of these novel forms of cultural goods.
Isis is currently working on the project “Microwork and Virtual Production Networks in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia” investigating the economic and social implications of new forms of economic activities in the context of ICTs for development. Before that Isis was involved with research on learning and interaction in MOOCs, and on participatory digital tools for artistic production.
In 2010/11 Isis was awarded AHRC SLI grant under the Beyond Text programme enabling the delivery of a two-day international conference on Remix Cinema, and various related public engagement initiatives.
Trained in the social sciences as well as the humanities, Isis holds a BA and MA in Rhetoric from the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, and an MSc in Technology and Learning from the Department of Education, University of Oxford. Prior to joining the academic community, Isis worked in broadcast journalism and screenwriting in her native Copenhagen.
Research Interests
Networked cultural production, virtual labour, microwork, crowdsourcing, digital ethnography, creative industries, critical sociology, symbolic capital, global inequalities, crowd-based learning, ICT for development.
