Muira McCammon, PhD
Assistant Professor | Tulane University
New Orleans, LA, UNITED STATES
Muira McCammon is an expert in digital culture, tech ethics, government comms, social media regulation, Gitmo and the legacy of 9/11.
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Biography
Muira McCammon is an assistant professor in Tulane’s Department of Communication, where she researches government speech, digital culture, and the politics of media technologies. She is also an assistant professor in the Tulane Law School.
She is an organizational, institutional, and socio-legal scholar, who studies how government data, information, and communication flow through corporate social media platforms. Her present research draws on archival data, digital ethnography, and other qualitative methods to understand, document, and reimagine government communication practices. In her work, she is committed to thinking through the power of absence, ephemerality, and ignorance in civil society.
She has held fellowships at the Sitka Fellows Program, the Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab, and the Turkish Fulbright Commission. She is a proud former Beinecke Scholar. Before entering academia, McCammon worked as a freelance national security reporter, focusing primarily on the imagined futures and legacy of Guantánamo Bay.
McCammon maintains a number of research collaborations. She co-edited a double special issue on dead and dying digital platforms for Internet Histories over the pandemic. She also previously worked as a research intern at Microsoft Research's Social Media Collective.
You can find her work in New Media & Society, Information, Communication, and Society, as well as Slate, Columbia Journalism Review, and VICE.
Areas of Expertise (12)
Government Use & Regulation of Social Media
U.S. laws governing the deletion and disappearance of federal records and archives
Military Policy Researcher
Digital Culture
Information Policy
Dead & Dying Social Media Platforms
Tech Ethics
Emerging Tech & Internet Law
War Crimes Researcher
History of Tech and the Internet
Guantánamo Bay
9/11 and the legacy of TSA
Accomplishments (5)
Carol S. Levin Fund for Faculty Research & Creative Projects (professional)
2024
Tulane’s Center for Public Policy Research (professional)
2024
Grant from Tulane University’s Innovation Institute (professional)
2024
Grant from Tulane University’s Newcomb Institute (professional)
2024
Grant from Tulane University’s Center for Learning & Teaching (professional)
2024
Education (5)
University of Pennsylvania: Doctor of Philosophy, Communication Studies 2022
University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School: Masters Degree, Law 2020
University of Pennsylvania: Masters Degree, Communication
University of Massachusetts-Amherst: Masters Degree, Translation Studies 2016
Carleton College: Bachelor of Arts, International Relations, Political Science and French/Francophone Studies 2013
Affiliations (6)
- Association of Internet Researchers
- International Communication Association
- Society for the History of Technology
- International Association for Media and Communication Research
- Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
- Internet Law and Policy Foundry
Links (2)
Languages (4)
- Arabic
- Turkish
- French
- English
Media Appearances (2)
Families react to 9/11 plea deals that finally arrive after 23 years
USA Today online
2024-08-02
Guantanamo Bay expert Muira McCammon said the trial could have been a Nuremburg moment for the post-9/11 United States, referring to the post-World War II trials where evidence of the Holocaust was documented.
Mastodon Is Hurtling Toward a Tipping Point
Wired online
2022-12-21
Muira McCammon, a doctoral candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania who has researched social platform death, says Mastodon is currently less performance and more “negotiation and confusion” around its purpose and evolution, which may prove less enticing for some. People may be spending more time on other networks or trying them out, but it’s soon to say if they will fill Twitter’s void.
Articles (10)
Zoomers Versus the National Security State
Logic
Muira McCammon
2021-09-30
In October 2019, an op-ed in a student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte made an allegation that rippled across campus: it claimed that the university’s administration had quietly appointed a war criminal as the new head of campus safety and security. The man, retired army colonel John Bogdan, had spent two years running the notorious detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay.
After DeepNude, ideas for more conscientious coverage of synthetic media
Columbia Journalism Review
DAN BATEYKO AND MUIRA MCCAMMON
2019-09-11
In late June, Samantha Cole, a reporter for Motherboard, the Vice technology site, caught word that an anonymous programmer was planning to sell a contentious synthetic media tool. In an article headlined “This Horrifying App Undresses a Photo of Any Woman With a Single Click,” she described how the app, DeepNude, uses machine learning to transform photos of fully-clothed women into realistic nudes.
Why did the Joint Task Force of Guantánamo start deleting its tweets?
Slate
Muira McCammon
2018-04-17
Most people haven’t noticed that there’s an official Twitter feed for the Joint Task Force of Guantánamo (@JTFGTMO), the U.S. military installation responsible for managing the detention facility. Even fewer people noticed that something odd has happened: Whoever runs the account has deleted more than 500 tweets since the summer of 2016.
Inside the Bureaucratic Nightmare That Is Reporting on Gitmo
Vice
Muira McCammon
2017-07-28
How long wait times and lack of precedent impede efforts to study the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.
“That Was Just a Coincidence”: What a Children’s Radio Show from the 1980’s Can Teach Us About Stopping the Spread of Misinformation Today
Medium
Muira McCammon
2017-07-28
In the 1980’s, Kids America, a Peabody Award-winning syndicated radio show for children, tackled thorny topics of all shapes and sizes, but I am drawn time and time again to the episode that aired on the day the Space Shuttle Challenger shuttle exploded. On that day, January 28, 1986, a listener called in and asked for a song, a “maybe everything is okay” sort of song, insisting that the astronauts had indeed survived the crash. So, Susan Dias, one of the musicians, who appeared frequently on Kids America, whipped up a tune.
Pokémon Go Took Over the World Last Year, Including Gitmo
Vice
Muira McCammon
2017-07-27
"The arrival of improved internet and cellular service in Gitmo completely transformed the social ecosystem of the base."
Meet the Woman Fighting the Battle Against Boredom for Gitmo Staff
Vice
Muira McCammon
2017-07-25
Sharon Coganow runs a tiny game room for service members at Gitmo.
Inside the Gaming Library at Gitmo, America's Controversial Military Prison
Vice
Muira McCammon
2017-07-24
At Play in the Carceral State is a week-long series investigating play in, around, and about prisons and prison culture. Learn more here.
The Culture of Games at Gitmo Goes Beyond Prisoners and Guards
Vice
Muira McCammon
2017-06-26
At Play in the Carceral State is a week-long series investigating play in, around, and about prisons and prison culture. Learn more here.
What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Gitmo: Games
Vice
Muira McCammon
2016-12-12
Games and the Guantánamo Bay detention facility have a long, contentious history.
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