Jessie Daniels

Professor, Author, Innovator, Digital Sociologist

Jessie Daniels, PhD is Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, and The Graduate Center. She is the author or editor of five books: Cyber Racism (2009) and White Lies (1997), Digital Sociologies (Policy Press, 2016), Being a Scholar in the Digital Era (Policy Press, 2017), and Going Public (UChicago, 2018).

Academic Interests

Trained as a sociologist, my work about race, gender, sexuality and new media has appeared in the journals New Media & Society, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Theory in Action, American Journal of Public Health, and Health Promotion and Practice. In 2011, a paper I wrote about race, incarceration and masculinity won the Sarah Mazelis Paper of the Year Award given by the Society of Public Health Education. My most recent book, Cyber Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) is widely used in college classrooms. 

I’ve also worked in the Internet industry as a Senior Producer at Talk City where I supervised a staff that produced live online events for Fortune 500 clients. I came back into academia through a large, NIH-funded project at Rikers Island that examined the health impact of incarceration on young men of color. 

Returning to social justice work in the academy after working in the Internet industry convinced me that there are ways to combine scholar-activism with digital media. I’ve done this work in various ways over the last decade or so. Since 2007, an I’ve maintained a scholarly blog (http://www.RacismReview.com) with Joe R. Feagin (past president of the American Sociological Association). In 2010, Forbes Magazine named me one of “20 Inspiring Women to Follow on Twitter.” You can find me there at: @JessieNYC

In 2012, I developed JustPublics@365, a multidimensional project funded by the Ford Foundation (2013), intended to open scholarly research to the public sphere and connect it to existing social justice activism. A key component of this project are the MediaCamp workshops, which offer training for academics in the skills of digital journalism through a unique collaboration between The Graduate Center Library and the CUNY J-School.