Douglas-Wade Brunton

I am a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the department I earned my master’s degree in New Media and Society from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.

A media ethnographer, I am broadly interested in the relationship between media and identity. Using sport, music, body image and physical movement as lenses of analysis of the creative and cultural industries, as well as the media and society in the Caribbean, my work seeks to answer questions around the ways in which the media affects both diasporical and regional constructs of West Indian identity.

The interest in media, culture, and identity in global contexts; informs another related strand of research into digital infrastructure studies. Drawing on postcolonial theory and surveillance studies, this work is in the main concerned with the role online performance of self plays in the interpretive constructs of identity – particularly for people of color.