Jessica Kate Crowell
Assistant Professor / PhD in Media Studies
research
My research brings together feminist theory, sustainability education, and media studies to investigate how technological and environmental systems reproduce inequality—and how pedagogical and digital interventions can support more just, participatory futures. I am also a firm believer in engaged scholarship, and as such, I have authored policy reports on work and information access for governments, global NGOs, and private foundations.
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Peer-Reviewed Academic Publications:
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Crowell, J.K. & Bellody, K. (2026). Bridging sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion through transformative sustainability pedagogy. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 1 – 20. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-12-2024-0874
Crowell, J.K. (2025). Towards an ecofeminist pedagogy: the environmental ethics of AI. Feminist Pedagogy, 6(3), 1 – 20. https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/feministpedagogy/vol6/iss3/2
Crowell, J.K. (2021). Broadband adoption and ethnographic approaches. In. K. Mossberger, E. Welch & Y. Wu, (Eds.), Transforming everything? Evaluating broadband’s impacts across policy areas. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. https://academic.oup.com/book/39107
Bach, A., Wolfson, T. & Crowell, J.K. (2018). Poverty, literacy, and social transformation: An interdisciplinary exploration of the digital divide. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 10(1), 22 - 41. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/jmle/vol10/iss1/2/
Wolfson, T., Crowell, J.K., Reyes, C., & Bach, A. (2017). Emancipatory broadband adoption: Toward a critical theory of digital inequality in the urban United States, Communication, Culture & Critique, 10(3), 441 – 459. DOI:10.1111/cccr.12166
McCollough, K., Crowell, J.K. & Napoli, P.M. (2017). Portrait of the online local news audience, Digital Journalism, 5(1), 100 – 118. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21670811.2016.1152160
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Check out presentations
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Presentation of "Liquid Labor, Precarious Lives: An Urban Ethnography of Online Work and Digital Inequality"
Sample Policy and Impact Research
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I have extensive policy and research grant experience and have collaborated with both government and nonprofit organizations. My most recent partnership is an article on using qualitative research to better understand news audiences sponsored by the Local News Lab at the Democracy Fund.
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I previously produced a policy recommendation for the New Jersey Office of Information Technology on best practices for broadband training programs. An abstract of that document is available here.
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I also collaborated with the Philadelphia Freedom Rings Partnership for two years via the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) collecting ethnographic data on broadband training programs. A link to the final report provided to BTOP and the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) is available here via the Urban Affairs Coalition.
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