Jen Schradie is a digital sociologist at the Centre de Recherche sur les Inégalités at Sciences Po in Paris. A graduate of Duke University and the Harvard Kennedy School, she received her PhD in sociology and new media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work on digital democracy has been featured on CNN and the BBC and in the New Yorker, Time, The Washington Post, France Culture, and Le Monde, among others. Schradie is a frequent analyst on France 24.

Her Harvard University Press book, The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives, won the 2020 Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association, and it was recently published in French. WIRED Magazine chose her book as one of its top summer reads, noting, “Hers may not be the internet culture take you want…but it’s likely the one you need.”

Schradie’s research, awarded grants from the National Science Foundation and the The Agence Nationale de la Recherche, challenges both digital democracy utopia or internet villain dystopia. Instead, she finds societal structures of class inequality, bureaucratic institutions, and political ideology all drive internet use. Her areas of study span the digital divide, digital activism, and digital labor. Her current comparative project focuses on gender and class differences in the start-up economy in France and the U.S., and another set of projects compares the digital disinformation diffusion between France and the United States. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods with online and offline data, she contextualizes disparities and variation of participation in digital society.

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