A digital sociologist, Jen Schradie graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School and received her PhD from UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media and the Department of Sociology. Currently a researcher and professor at the Center for Research on Social Inequalities at Sciences Po Paris, she is a leading scholar of technology and inequality, from AI and Algorithms to Startups and Social Media. Her research on digital democracy has been featured on CNN and the BBC and in the New Yorker, Le Monde, and WIRED, among others. She was awarded the UC Berkeley Public Sociology Alumni Prize and her Harvard University Press book, The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives, won the Charles Tilly Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association and was published in French. She was awarded the UC Berkeley Public Sociology Alumni Prize and has directed six documentary films. In her spare time, she has been an extra in a Madonna movie, played banjo at a Bluegrass festival in the alps, and taught yoga to cancer survivors and rebel guerillas.
Digital Power Gaps:
Content, Activism, Startups, Information, and AI
For two decades, Schradie’s data has challenged clichés that the internet is utopian or dystopian. Before today’s alarm over misinformation, AI, and democracy, her research reveals an uncomfortable truth: online platforms amplify the power of those who already have it. The result is digital power gaps. Across projects she has shown how structural inequalities infuse every ‘new’ digital promise.
Schradie is a public speaker on digital power gaps, from AI in Society to Startup Nations. She has given talks ranging from the National Academy of Sciences and the OECD to global tech and startup events.
Schradie teaches democrtic participation as both a method and a concept, connecting theory, data, and digital life to understand how power and inequality shape democracy today. At Sciences Po in Paris, she currently teaches classes on AI and Sociology, Digital Data in Society, and Digital Inequality.
