Zoë Glatt

I am a digital anthropologist and intersectional feminist researcher with interests in platformised creative industries and labour, social media and influencer cultures, and digital ethnographic methods. I am an incoming postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft’s Social Media Collective in Cambridge, MA, where I will be working on my first monograph The Platformised Creative Worker: Inequality, Co-Option and Resistance in the Influencer Industry under the mentorship of Nancy Baym, Tarleton Gillespie and Mary Gray.

I recently submitted my PhD in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE, which was an ethnographic study of the London influencer industry (2017-2023), interrogating the ways in which the platformisation of creative labour marks an intensification of conditions of precarity and inequality for cultural workers. This research involved conducting fieldwork offline at industry and community events (VidCon USA & UK, SitC, London Small YouTubers Org) and online across platforms (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter etc.), interviews with content creators, and autoethnographic research in the form of becoming a YouTuber myself. My PhD was supervised by Professors Sonia Livingstone and Sarah Banet-Weiser and fully funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

I’ve held roles as the Graduate Student Representative for the Association of Internet Researchers (2019-2021), Managing Editor of the ICA journal Communication, Culture & Critique (2018-2021) and Associate Lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths University. I am the Co-Founder of The Digital Ethnography Collective, hosting public lectures and workshops in London and online in order to foster collaborative digital ethnographic work. You can download our collectively produced Digital Ethnography Reading List, join our mailing list and watch our livestreamed meetings. I also manage a collective reading list about Influencer Industries & Creator Culture. I have a BA Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and an MA Digital Media from Goldsmiths University. Prior to my academic career I worked for various television production companies, which ignited my interest in labour in the cultural industries.

I am regularly interviewed as a social media and influencer culture expert by journalists and have featured in Wired, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Telegraph, BBC & BBC 5 Live radio, Rolling Stone, Vice, GQ and ITV News, amongst others.