Jen Schradie

Jen Schradie
Born	Jennifer Anne Schradie (1966-10-02) October 2, 1966 Toledo, Ohio, U.S.
🏳️ Nationality	American, French
💼 Occupation
Known for	Research on Social Class, Social Media and Social Movements in the areas of Social Stratification and Inequality, Communication and Information Technologies, Labor and Social Movements
🌐 Website	www.schradie.com twitter.com/schradie

Jen Schradie (born Jennifer Anne Schradie on October 2, 1966) is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Observatoire sociologique du changement (OSC) at Sciences Po in Paris, France where her research and teaching focuses on digital activism, digital labor, and the digital divide. Her work has become influential in academic circles. She has also become a high-profile public commentator on digital issues. Her notable work includes the award-winning book published in 2019, "The Revolution That Wasn't: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives." Prior to her academic career, Schradie was a documentary filmmaker and community organizer.

Early life and education

Schradie grew up in Toledo, Ohio. She attended Ottawa Hills High School from 1981–1985. She then enrolled at Duke University where she majored in Public Policy Studies and graduated in 1989.

Activism

As an undergraduate at Duke University, Schradie became increasingly active in political movements on campus. During her first year, she was part of a student group promoting better relations between Black and White students on campus. In 1988, she organized a campus-wide boycott of grapes in support of a United Farm Workers Union campaign against pesticides’ impact on workers’ health. She also spent a semester on a study abroad program in Nicaragua at the height of the U.S.-Contra War against that country.

Following her graduation, she became medical coordinator for the North Carolina Student Rural Health Coalition from 1989 to 1994. The NCSRHC helped five poor, majority-Black communities in Eastern North Carolina organize People’s Health Clinics. Schradie recruited medical students from Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and East Carolina University to staff the clinics. During this time, she also became active in the response to the 1991 Hamlet chicken processing plant fire that killed 25 workers in Hamlet, North Carolina.

In 1994, Schradie took a job at a Food Lion grocery store in Durham, North Carolina as part of an effort to unionize the workforce.

Documentary Films

Schradie’s background in activism led her into exploring documentary filmmaking. In The Revolution That Wasn't, Schradie wrote: "I embraced video as a way for local people to be able to tell their stories directly, rather than through intermediaries like me…The availability of VHS video seemed to be a revolutionary way for stories about the disenfranchised to reach a wider audience."

Schradie has produced and co-directed six documentaries which primarily have a social theme, including:

• Toxic Terrorism: The Shiloh Coalition Fights Back, 1990
• Organizing the South, 1992
• Fruit of Labor: Inspire the Struggle, 1995
• Housekeepers: Inconvenient Heroes, 1997

Following her union organizing work, Schradie worked at the North Carolina Agency For Public Telecommunications where she both continued to develop her directing skills while also becoming active in state employees’ collective bargaining issues.

Matt Devries (left) and Jen Schradie interview a villager in Hacienda Looc.

In 2000 Schradie co-directed with Matt DeVries the documentary “The Golf War – a story of land, golf and revolution in the Philippines.” Schradie had originally gone to the Philippines with the intention of making a documentary about sweatshops, but while traveling with the guerilla New People’s Army, learned that issues related to land reform were more pressing. The film followed the residents of the Filipino village Hacienda Looc as they battled the government and developers who were attempting to seize their land and turn it into a golf resort. Among the people featured in the film were Tiger Woods and his father who happened to be visiting the country to promote golf course development. The film was accepted to numerous film festivals and won 22 film festival awards.

Academic Career

In 2006, Schradie began her graduate studies with a master’s program at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. The following year, she started a doctoral program in Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley where she was also affiliated with the Berkeley Center For New Media. Her research focused on the digital divide in terms of who had the means and access to create content and participate in Web 2.0 platforms such as social media and networking. Schradie named this phenomenon “digital production inequality.”

Schradie mapped out many of these concepts in the journal article “The digital production gap: The digital divide and Web 2.0 collide” published in the April 2011 issue of Poetics. In the article, Schradie identified a “class-based gap among producers of online content. A critical mechanism of this inequality is control of digital tools and an elite Internet-in-practice and information habitus to use the Internet.” The work presented a new aspect in debates around the digital divide and has been cited 208 times.

In 2012, the Information, Communication & Society journal published “The Trend of Class, Race, and Ethnicity in Social Media Inequality.” Using extensive survey data, Schradie found that “blogging fits into a productive framework that requires more resources” and as a result that persistent gaps exist along racial, educational, and class lines in terms of who generated blog content. The study also produced the surprising finding that African Americans blogged at a higher rate than whites.

Schradie began a research fellowship in 2014 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, based at the Toulouse School of Economics in Toulouse, France that would last four years. After the end of her post-doc in Toulouse, Schradie was hired by Sciences Po Paris in 2018 as an associate professor in sociology. In France, she expanded her work on digital gaps to include comparative work on the French population. With the start of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) in 2018, she became a frequent commentator on France 24 and other media about the role of social media in starting and sustaining the movement. Schradie cast doubt on the conventional wisdom that social networking platforms played a central role in sparking the protests. Instead, she argued that the real roots lay in real-world social and economic disparities, with social media being used as an important tool.

With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Schradie joined a group of Sciences Po researchers tasked with studying the social impact of Covid on French society. The resulting research spanned several months and resulted in a series of publications drawing from data, surveys, and interviews. The work included the surprising findings, dubbed the “Eye of the Hurricane” Paradox, that while “the large majority of individuals who are not infected by the virus may be seeing their current condition in a more positive light than they normally would.”

The Revolution That Wasn't

During her doctoral work at Berkeley, Schradie began fieldwork for her dissertation that drew on her previous experiences as a public employee and activist in North Carolina. In 2011 and 2012, Schradie spent extensive time interviewing activists across the political spectrum who were involved in some way in the public employee bargaining rights.

Dissertation:

Qualitative Political Communication| Labor Unions, Social Media, and Political Ideology: Using the Internet to Reach the Powerful or Mobilize the Powerless?

https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3384

“The Digital Activism Gap: How Class and Costs Shape Online Collective Action,” Social Problems 65(1):51-74.

https://academic.oup.com/socpro/article/65/1/51/4795348

2018   “Moral Monday is More Than a Hashtag: The Strong Ties of Social Movement     Emergence in the Digital Era,” Social Media + Society, January-March: 1-13

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322944173_Moral_Monday_Is_More_Than_a_Hashtag_The_Strong_Ties_of_Social_Movement_Emergence_in_the_Digital_Era

Honors and awards

• 2012 Public Sociology Alumni Prize at UC Berkeley.
• 2020 American Sociological Association’s Book Forum Selection for 2021 Annual Meeting.
• 2020 Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, American Sociological Association’s Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements.
• 2020 Outstanding Book Award, ACSJ, International Communication Association.

Personal life

She is married and has two children.

• Context collapse

References

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