Dissertation Title:

Amanda Starling Gould, PhD, is a technology scholar with a particular interest in the environmental effects of digital technologies and questions the ways technologies of connection can cause disconnect, bias, and harm. She thinks, for example, about how our technologies design us, and about how the unequal distribution of power and access are designed into the system. (More on Research) In her current appointment with Duke’s Graduate Liberal Studies program, she seeks to enable students to interrogate these issues and pursue critical interdisciplinary research projects of their own.

She teaches undergraduate, graduate, and adult learners on topics related to critical digital studies, public and digital humanities, designing equitable futures, and for many years taught a class called Learning to Fail for the Innovation & Entrepreneurship department at Duke.

Prior to moving to the Partnership for Public Service, she co-directed Duke’s Story+ Research program, where she worked with hundreds of researchers within the academy, in the community, and beyond to develop projects, manage research teams, create communities of practice, and translate their knowledge into stories for public audiences. She was also the Program Director for Educational Programs and Digital Humanities at the Duke John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute where she designed digital learning experiences, consulted on projects, and supported the integration of critical digital thinking across the disciplines.

Committee Members:

N. Katherine Hayles, Michael Hardt, Mark B.N. Hansen, David F. Bell

Research Interests:  

"Digital Metabolisms: Mapping a Digital Environmental Humanities through Materiality," plots the complex intersections of digital media and the environment, and questions the absence of environmental thinking from digital theory. The project draws out the tangible impacts that our networked digital technologies are registering on the earth to recognize them as critical sites for digital media study. What becomes clear is that the daily use of our weightless, wireless devices becomes ethically-charged with heavy issues of labor, pollution, human health, and environmental sustainability. By rejecting the easy premise of the digital network as purely computational, we see that contemporary digitality is profoundly environmental. Her current teaching and research work investigates digital materiality, the bio- and geo-physicalities of the digital network, digital environmental humanities, environmental justice, digital communication, network ecologies, augmented realities, information architectures, digital publication design, and digital humanities scholarship.

Curriculum Vitae