Isabelle is an ESRC funded PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Cambridge. She holds a double first-class honours BA degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and an MPhil in the Sociology of Marginality and Exclusion from the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge.
Her current research, which she began as an undergraduate, focuses on how the design and use of the internet affects transnational and transracial adoption in the USA. She is specifically focused on tracing the reproduction of intersectionally racialised inequalities through everyday digital practices carried out by state actors and adoptive parent social media influencers. She connects these practices to long histories of settler colonialism and chattel enslavement in the USA. Isabelle is particularly interested in situating her research in a wider social context of contestation, paying attention to the overlap of reproductive, racial and digital injustice in a transatlantic context.
Isabelle has received a range of awards for her academic work. As an undergraduate, these included the Winifred Georgina Holgate Pollard Memorial Prize for outstanding results from the University of Cambridge (for scoring first in a cohort of 181 students) and selection by the Fulbright Commission as the sole UK candidate to attend a summer school in on Civic Engagement in the USA. As an MPhil student, Isabelle was awarded the Polity Prize by the Department of Sociology for best Dissertation. In 2022 Isabelle held an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, as well as a fellowship at the New School’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry in New York, and a fellowship with Cambridge Digital Humanities.
In 2023, Isabelle began a postdoctoral position in in ‘Digital Wellness and Disinformation’ with the ESRC funded Digital Good Network. Working with researchers at the University of Sheffield and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she is researching the connections between digital wellness communities, conspiracy theories and the far right, a project she became interested in after observing the increasing range of far-right content during her research into adoption. She is also a Teaching Fellow with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where she contributes to the MSt in AI Ethics and Society.
Isabelle has published her empirical research with the journal New Media and Society. Her commitment to developing critical research methods is reflected in the contract she holds with Bloomsbury Academic Press for a book which explores 'Decoloniality in Research Methods'.
Isabelle is passionate about using the tools that social science research offers to contribute to social justice movements. Her research consistently reminds her that academics are connected to the social fields and phenomena that they research. Further information on this work is covered in the ‘additional information’ section below. Isabelle is always keen to develop collaborations and networks which work to challenge structural injustice both within and beyond the academy.
