Professor Anna Feigenbaum
- 01202 961238
- afeigenbaum@bournemouth.ac.uk
- Professor In Digital Storytelling
- Weymouth House W309, Talbot Campus, Fern Barrow, Poole, BH12 5BB
- Keywords:
- Communication
- New media
- Politics
- Social change
Biography
I am a Professor in Digital Storytelling here at BU where I also co-head the Science, Health and Data Communications Research Centre. My research spans these fields of communication. I am the author of Tear Gas (Verso Books 2017) and an author of Protest Camps (Zed/Bloomsbury 2013), Protest Camps in International Context (Policy Press 2017) and The Data Storytelling Workbook (Routledge 2020). I am currently working on a monograph for Verso about infertility and the IVF marketplace and publishing findings from my UKRI/AHRC COVID-19 Rapid Response research project that investigated the use of webcomics on social media to share public health messages: https://www.covidcomics.org/
I regularly publish my interdisciplinary work in peer review journals and edited collections that span the fields of Media Studies, Geography, Architecture, Art History and Design, International Relations and Science and Technology Studies. In addition, I am an active science communicator and work regularly with journalists and producers to share my research across a wide diversity of national and international outlets... Recent appearances include: The Globe and Mail, Bloomberg Business, BBC Radio 3, RadioLab and Getting Curious with Jonathan VanNess.
Before joining the Faculty of Media and Communication at BU in 2012, I taught at Richmond, the American University in London and held fellow positions at the Rutgers University Center for Historical Analysis, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Institute for Historical Research at University of London. I graduated from McGill University in 2008 with a PhD in Communication Studies. My doctoral research on communication and creativity at women's peace camps was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada and the Beaverbrook Fund at McGill.
For me, social change is inseparable from critical thinking and compassionate communication. I actively engage in teaching quality enhancement and learning innovation my roles at BU and as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. As part of this commitment, I am an avid supporter of open source pedagogies and collaborative learning, running the wethinking the classroom project and serving on the advocacy forum for the Open Library of Humanities.
Beyond the university, I run a variety of training workshops on data storytelling, digital communications and creative collaborations for local businesses, NGOs, health organisations and community groups. I also provide consultancy for campaigns, archives and museum exhibitions related to my research. This has included contributions toward the Disobedient Objects show at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cruel Designs at Banksy's Dismaland and Forensic Architecture's Triple-Chaser at the Whitney Biennale.
moreResearch
Engaging with the history of digital media, I investigate how technological practices shape political and social action. My work is concerned with how communication is mediated in spaces of struggle, contestation and controversy–be it by bar charts or barbed wire fences.
I am an author of the Data Storytelling Workbook (Routledge 2020). This interdisciplinary workbook offers practitioners and researchers evidence-based techniques for telling factual stories in emotive and effective ways. A visualisation project in itself, the workbook is being designed in collaboration with Minute Works creative studio, research illustrator Alexandra Alberda and journalist Aria Alamalhodaei..
My first monograph Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today came out with Verso in 2017. This research was funded by a Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities grant. It uses digital humanities and data storytelling methods to track the movement of tear gas from the trenches of WW1 to the streets of today, asking ‘How did it become normal to police communication with poison’? The monograph is translated into French and Italian (forthcoming), its content has appeared in media outlets around the world from a Radiolab podcast to a Le Monde documentary video. The research has informed journalistic reporting, NGO strategy and a US Congressional Investigation in the public health impacts of tear gas at protests.
I am also co-author of the book Protest Camps (Zed 2013), which explores the media, governance and social practices of over 50 protest camps across the span of 50 years... From the Aboriginal Tent Embassy to Occupy Wall Street, Protest Camps tells transnational stories, looking at how strategies of resistance travel and adapt as they move around the world. Our edited collection, Protest Camps in an International Context came out with Policy Press in Spring 2017 and the 10th anniversary edition of Protest Camps will come out with Bloomsbury in 2023.
In addition to these books, my work can be found in a range of edited collections and peer review academic journals including Sociological Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, ephemera, Feminist Media Studies, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, among others. In addition, I regularly contribute to the media, with my research featured on BBC Radio 4, The Guardian, the Atlantic, Salon.com, the Financial Times, BBC Mundo, Vox and Cosmopolitan magazine. Using this diverse experience of working with the media, I now train other academics in public engagement and research-based storytelling.
moreFavourites
- Alamalhodaei, A., Feigenbaum, A. and Alberda, A., 2020. Humanizing data through 'data comics': An introduction to graphic medicine and graphic social science. In: Kennedy, H. and Engebretsen, M., eds. Data Visualization in Society. Amsterdam University Press.
- Feigenbaum, A. and Weissmann, D.G.B., 2020. What counts as police violence? A case study of data in the CATO Institute's police misconduct reporting project. Canadian Journal of Communication, 45 (1), 91-100.
- Feigenbaum, A. and Alamalhodaei, A., 2020. The Data Storytelling Workbook. Routledge.
- FEIGENBAUM, A. and MCCURDY, P., 2018. Activist Reflexivity and Mediated Violence: Putting the Policing of Nuit Debout in Context. International Journal of Communication, 12, 1887-1907.
- Feigenbaum, A., 2017. Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WW1 to the Streets of Today. Verso.
- Feigenbaum, A., Thorsen, E., Weissmann, D. and Demirkol, O., 2016. Visualising data stories together: Reflections on data journalism education from the Bournemouth University Datalabs Project. Journalism Education, 5 (2), 59-74.
- Feigenbaum, A., 2015. From cyborg feminism to drone feminism: Remembering women’s anti-nuclear activisms. Feminist Theory, 16 (3), 265-288.
- Feigenbaum, A. and Kanngieser, A., 2015. For a politics of atmospheric governance. Dialogues in Human Geography, 5 (1), 80-84.
- Hintz, A., 2015. Protest Camps. 843-845.
- Feigenbaum, A., Frenzel, F. and McCurdy, P., 2013. Protest Camps. Zed.
- Frenzel, F., Feigenbaum, A. and McCurdy, P., 2013. 'A research framework for the study of protest camps’. The Sociological Review.
- Feigenbaum, A. and Iqani, M., 2013. Quality after the cuts? Higher education practitioners' accounts of systemic challenges to teaching quality in times of 'austerity'. Journal of Further and Higher Education.
- Feigenbaum, A., 2012. Written in the Mud: (Proto)Zine-making and autonomous media at the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. Feminist Media Studies.
