Be My Student – danah boyd

Be My Student: Information for Potential PhD Students

I love research. And I love learning. And I especially love learning with other people.

Last Updated: October 15, 2025

Be My Student: Information for Potential PhD Students

Thank you for your interest in working with me! I wanted to provide some information for potential PhD students who want to work with me. Please also take a moment to also read my general advice to graduate students interested in pursuing a PhD.

Logistics

I am a professor at Cornell University in the Department of Communication which is a part of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Details about the program, including requirements and how to apply, can be found on Cornell’s website. Applications for PhD students are due December 1. There’s also a FAQ that you should review. Here’s a few things I want to highlight:

Cornell’s Dept of Communication uses a holistic admissions process to ensure that incoming students receive the best support possible. Admissions decisions are made collaboratively, rather than relying on individual faculty members to champion for a particular applicant.
All accepted students are assigned a temporary advisor, but this might not be their dissertation advisor.
If you are interested in the possibility of working with me, I recommend that you list my name in your application materials. This will allow our admissions committee to “tag” me as a potential reviewer.
In the interest of fairness, I am not available to meet with prospective applicants. You can connect with faculty and current students at Cornell’s fall recruitment events. (There is a live session on October 30, 2025. Sign up here.)

Cornell Communication students are expected to live in Ithaca, NY during the academic year. Exceptions for fieldwork are possible. You should expect your PhD to take a minimum of 5 years, including coursework.Your graduate degree would be funded by some combination of Teaching Assistantships (TA) and Research Assistantships (RA). You would need to be on-site to receive TA funding. RA funding would be dependent on the particular grant requirements.

You will need to take core classes and build a PhD committee. (Note: this is standard in the United States but not elsewhere.) For this reason, you should look around at the other faculty in my department. You should be able to identify at least two other faculty that you would want to learn from and could imagine having as your advisor. If I am the only faculty member you are interested in working with, this is not the right program for you.

What I'm Looking For?

I am interested in training empirical social scientists who are asking hard questions about the sociotechnical world we live in. I am primarily looking for students who are interested in qualitative methods (e.g., ethnography, interviews, etc.) but I am also open to mixed methods researchers. If you are not interested in conducting rigorous original empirical research, I am not the right advisor for you.

I am looking for students who want to devour scholarly literature from different theoretical traditions. I read at least a book a week and I expect you to read voraciously as well. I don’t expect you to have read everything before grad school (why would you attend grad school if you have?) but I do expect you to be open to reading across domains when here. I also expect you to come to graduate school with an appreciation of at least one theoretical tradition that tickles your brain. Theories are there to think with. What theories do you think with?

I am especially interested in students whose lived experiences and personal trajectory mean that you come to graduate school with a range of experiences and exposures to how the world works. Perhaps you worked in industry, government, or civil society. Perhaps you have done community organizing or traveled the world. Perhaps you have grown up in a situation that gave you experiences that your peers didn’t have. Doing social science research requires learning to see different contexts – and you are better equipped to be a graduate student if you are familiar with a range of different environments. And, besides, access is the largest challenge for doing empirical research; show me that you have enough lived experience to move between worlds.

My job as a PhD advisor is to train you methodologically and theoretically. The reason that I train graduate students is because I get to learn from them in the process. I am not looking for students who want to study the same things that I am studying. To the contrary, I’m looking for students who are interested in studying something that I want to learn about. So I will be looking for students who surprise and entice me by chewing on a topic that I am not (yet) thinking about but want to understand.

I am especially keen to work with students who want to empirically examine systems and structures (including networks that uphold power) or explore the political economy of a sociotechnical configuration. Hint: This means that I’m unlikely to take on students who are broadly interested in social media, youth, disinformation, etc. If you are interested in questions related to identity, self-presentation, or online communities, I am not the right advisor.

Keep in mind that you are embarking on a journey. Your research agenda should not be shaped by what is popular right now. Instead, you (and I) need to make a bet on what will be important, relevant, and eye-opening in 7+ years. Help me see why the questions you are asking now will still be important in 7 years. There are always research fads. There are always students who can successfully jump on and ride an existing fad, but I’m looking for students who can make a well-placed bet on a topic that is not yet front and center in popular discourse. Even better: Ask a question that will still be important 25 years from now!

What Kind of Advisor Am I?

I love research. And I love learning. And I especially love learning with other people. I don’t need more publications to pad my CV, but I want to write with my students as an excuse to think together. I want you to come to me with ideas. I want to poke holes in your ideas so that you can strengthen your thinking. I want to push you to read more and think more deeply about issues. I want to relish in anecdotes from your fieldwork. But I will not project manage you. In other words, I want to be the second author with you at the driver seat.

I am an appropriate advisor for you if…

you are spilling over with ideas and are seeking refinement and challenge
you are quite capable of time management and self-organization
you are self-motivated, self-directed, and want someone to complicate the way you’re seeing the world
you know when to ask for help to unstick yourself
you relish critical feedback as a gift

I will expect you to own your research agenda and come to me seeking guidance/push-back. I expect you to engage in thoughtful reflexivity and to know and own what you need to thrive. I expect you to be a collaborative member of a research team and to generously contribute to others’ work in return for their contributions to yours.

Warning: I will push you to take classes in areas that make you uncomfortable. I firmly believe that coursework at the PhD level is about getting broad exposure to different theories and methods. (And besides, grades really don’t matter at this stage.)

What Am I Working On?

If you’re applying to work with me, my past work is less relevant than where I’m going. After all, if you are going to be my RA or be a part of my lab, you’re going to end up working part of the time on my ongoing projects rather than my older work. At present, these are some of the threads I’m pulling on:

Network power. I’m a sucker for questions that grapple with how existing networks (including organizations, sectors, etc.) respond to sociotechnical disruptions. How arrangements get rearranged, how power asserts itself. I’m less interested in the faces of power than the underlying strucutral forces. The conditions that make certain futures more or less possible. The political economy of AI. How VC operates in practice. How organizations get enrolled in sociotechnical agendas.
The Legitimacy of Data. I’m interested in data infrastructures, especially seemingly boring ones like federal statistics (I’m writing a book about the US census). The social and political forces behind the flow of data. How participatory engagement and transparency affect legitimacy. STS questions about expertise. The data pipelines underlying contemporary AI development.
Sociotechnical Security. I’m also fascinated by the ripple effects of algorithmic manipulation. Countless systems invite being gamed for any number of reasons. I’ve written about “data voids” but there’s also things like SEO, p-hacking, variations of prompt engineering, etc. The unintended consequences of unpredictable humans being in the loop. Unexpected sociotechnical vulnerabilities. Sociotechnical arbitrage opportunities.
Healthy social fabrics. I’m interested in the structural arrangements that compose organizations, institutions, sectors, and society. I’m fascinated by how social fabrics are built, made fragile, and fail. And I’m interested in the consequences of (un)healthy social fabrics. The mental health implications when young people don’t have access to non-custodial adults. The role of military troop formation in the development of civil rights. How the social engineering project of college dormitories shape political power. How political polarization is network-driven. The relationship between cleaved social fabrics and war. (And, yes, the role technology plays in supporting or undermining social fabric formation.)

As you can see, I’m far more interested in puzzles that are sociotechnical and structural in nature. So if you are interested in infrastructures, networks, structural power, or the political economy of our sociotechnical world, I might be a good advisor for you.