Whitney Erin Boesel is a Project Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where she leads a research effort to study online debates related to Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) as a member of the Media Cloud team. She is also a regular contributor and managing editor for the Society Pages blog Cyborgology, where she writes most often about social media and/or self-tracking. Since 2013, she has served on the committee for the annual conference Theorizing the Web.
Before joining Berkman, Whitney was a full-time graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she continues to pursue a PhD in Sociology; her dissertation research focuses on self-tracking as an example of what she has termed "biomedicalization 2.0." Prior to starting grad school, she worked in the Cambridge-area non-profit sector at both a harm-reduction-based AIDS services organization and a public interest group focused on genetics and biotechnology.
Whitney holds an M.A. in Sociology from UCSC and a B.S. in Writing from MIT. She is the co-author (with PJ Rey) of "The Web, Digital Prostheses, and Augmented Subjectivity" (forthcoming, Routledge), and has published essays on Spotify, online dating, and the group Quantified Self in the magazine The New Inquiry. She is active on Twitter as @weboesel.