Marissa Willcox is a Digital Ethnographer and feminist theorist. She works at the University of Amsterdam in the Media Studies Department as a Lecturer and Researcher. Her PhD research looked at how feminist, queer, non binary and POC artists used Instagram to create belonging for marginalised groups. Marissa is currently working on turning her PhD research into a monograph. Her research interests are focused on feminist art and activism, the exploration of digital cultures, young people and their everyday engagement with social media.
Short CV
Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher in New Media and Digital Culture
The University of Amsterdam
2022 – Current
As a Lecturer in the Media Studies program, I currently teach across a broad range of subjects including “Digital Methods”, “Digital Practices”, and “Queering Media Studies”. I course coordinate, give lectures, create lecture and seminar material, as well as grade assignments and supervise bachelor’s theses. More recently, I have been invited to design a course called “Digital Ethnography”. I also work as a part time researcher, where I conduct ethnographic research on an EU Horizon grant funded project called “vera.ai” to understand fact checker’s relations with and use of AI.
Research Associate
Deakin University, ARC Centre of Excellence
2022-2023
As a Research Associate in the Deakin University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child I worked alongside the research fellow on the “Mapping media use by families” project. We worked on building an international systematic review of literature which maps research in the fields of health, sociology, education and media studies globally to set up a foundation for the empirical ethnographic research for the project. This required knowledge and use of Scopus, Zotero, and Covidence and resulted in the writing of publications, the organization of fieldwork, managing data collection, conducting an analysis and writing up the results. We have just finalized a research paper on our systemic review.
As a Research Assistant in the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, I worked for Professor Anna Hickey-Moody on her ARC funded Future Fellowship titled “Interfaith Childhoods”. Part of my role responsibilities included project management and admin for the coordination of the research, reviewing and writing research publications, managing data sets and fieldwork relationships. I am involved in the Australian fieldwork and have worked in schools, religious settings and community centers across Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide running workshops with children and focus groups and interviews with parents. The empirical research is ethnographic and aims to understand children’s feelings of identity, faith and belonging whilst offering arts workshops, digital animation and community connection and discussion. Working as an RA on an ARC project has taught me about the breadth of methods used across various countries and demographics, and the differing skills needed for multi-sited ethnography. My tasks in this role have ranged from working with the community in arts based ethnography, to running project budgets and doing research for how young people engage with online platforms, are experiencing their gender, and race, and how the lens of the media affects the ways they feel about their faith and community. I have published two journal articles three book chapters and one book with Prof Anna Hickey-Moody and our research team.
Research Associate and Project Manager
RMIT University Australia