E.I.G. (Elisabetta) Costa, PhD

I am a digital anthropologist specialized in the study of social media in Turkey and the Middle East, with a focus on how communication technologies are changing politics, love, kinship, intimacy and interpersonal relationships. In 2011, I was awarded a PhD in Anthropology as part of the Interdisciplinary Programme in Information Society of the University of Milan-Bicocca (IT). My PhD thesis monograph, "Media Worlds & Journalists: Practices and Representations of Foreign Correspondents in Beirut", was evaluated as ‘outstanding’ by the PhD committee. Over the past 10 years, I have been accumulating relevant international experience in the field of media and digital anthropology. In 2011 and 2012, I worked as a consultant for an Italian consultancy firm doing ‘digital and net-ethnography’, and developing social media strategies for private Italian companies. This work experience provided me with the opportunity to apply digital ethnographic methods in the private sector. In 2013 and 2014 I carried out a long-term ethnographic research on the uses and consequences of social media on people’s everyday life in a medium-sized town in southeast Turkey, as part of the cutting-edge research project WhyWePost, funded by an ERC Advanced grants, and held at the Department of Anthropology at UCL, London. The results of this research were published in a monograph, Social Media in Southeast Turkey, which has more than 23K downloads worldwide, and in several peer-reviews articles and book chapters. The results of the collaborative project were published in a co-authored book, How the World Changed Social Media, which has more than 250K downloads. In 2015, I obtained a highly competitive postdoctoral fellowship from the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA), which gave me the opportunity to develop my research agenda to further the theoretical and ethnographic understanding of the relationships between digital technologies, morality, politics, and social relationships in the MENA region. In 2016 I was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Media and Journalism Study at the University of Groningen. More recently, I started a new research project on the uses of social media by Kurdish forced migrants in Milan, Italy.

I am the co-convenor of the EASA Media Anthropology Network.