University of Washington

Graduate Student, Communication

Other Affiliations: Columbia University, Anthropology

PhD Candidate

About

Brittany Fiore-Silfvast is a PhD Candidate in Communication at the University of Washington. Her research pursues questions about the intersection between information communication technologies (ICTs) and society and the relationship between communication and culture. Within these areas, her work has focused on organizational communication, the materiality of communication, network organization, collective action, and distributed knowledge production. She is fascinated by how the organizational and social practices around ICTs and the new forms of data these technologies produce shift and reshape communication. Her research looks at the introduction of new technology not simply as a technical phenomenon, but also as sets of social, organizational, and cultural negotiations that are important to study. Her recent ethnographic work in the commercial construction industry explored the role of new ICTs and materiality in collaborative work and organizational communication on inter-organizational, interdisciplinary temporary teams. Her current work aims to pursue these questions further in the context of primary healthcare settings and within the international development industry.

Previously, she earned her Master´s degree in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University. Her thesis work concentrated on the ways in which new information and communication technologies and networked communities of the Iraq War are transforming warfare. In addition to these research interests she has worked for the Kaiser Family Foundation developing their international health journalism program and as in the BriBri indigenous community in Central America as an ethnographer.

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