Teaching Associate in Media, Culture and Sociological Theory, Department of Sociology

Dr Isabelle Higgins is a Teaching Associate in Media, Culture and Sociological Theory at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge. Isabelle's research focuses on studying the reproduction of intersectional forms of social inequality through the design and use of everyday digital technologies. She holds a PhD from the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge; has held fellowships at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, the New School Institute for Critical Social Inquiry, Cambridge Digital Humanities and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. She is a research affiliate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge, and for the 2024 - 2025 academic year, she holds a Tech Policy Fellowship with UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. She has published her research with the journal New Media and Society.

Isabelle's policy interests relate to her recently completed PhD research which explored how children deemed eligible for adoption in the USA are represented and/or monetised online by actors including government agencies, private adoption agencies and adoptive parents who work as social media influencers. She drew on insights from a range of sociological (and adjacent) traditions, including the sociology of ‘race’ and racism, decolonial thought, reproductive sociology, ‘race critical code studies’ and media and cultural sociology, to show that the work of self-described ‘adoption advocates’ reproduces intersectionally racialised forms of structural inequality with long histories.

There are multiple policy implications that emerge from this research, because multiple actors engage in representing and sharing children's personal information in the public domain in a range of digital locations - from state funded websites to social media channels and in relation to generative AI technologies. Such data sharing thus raises crucial questions of privacy, consent and child safety online, and it is these questions that Isabelle's policy work aims to address.