Ms Addie McGowan
Job Title
Research Fellow
Research interests
Research interests
Her research interests include digital platforms, tourism, advertising, market studies, and digital culture.
Background
Addie’s interests in how digital platforms order and shape how we make and experience place(s) were developed during her doctoral research from 2019 – 2023. Funded by the Share City joint studentship in the Future Cities group of funded projects, across the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow, her PhD thesis explores the sharing economy in the city by way of asking how home sharing platforms like Airbnb (co)produce urban knowledge of place via their digital and social infrastructures. She holds an interdisciplinary background, supervised between Architecture (ESALA, Professor Richard Coyne) and Sociology (SPS at U of Edinburgh, Professor Nick Prior, and U of Glasgow, Professor Bridgette Wessels).
Her ongoing work as a Research Fellow with Donald MacKenzie's ESRC funded AdTech Research Project began in 2022 and continues to explore the material politics of online advertising, its tensions, and mundane experiences of practitioners.
Prior to her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, she earned an MSc in Digital Society from the University of Edinburgh (2018) and a BA in Sociology and Communication from Trinity University in San Antonio, TX USA (2008). In the near decade between her BA and MSc, Addie built a career in digital marketing, working as a digital strategist at various firms in the United States. The practical knowledge of the digital landscape she gained from this work ultimately inspired her return to academia to ask sociological questions of the platforms, data, and practices she encountered.