Our Mission

We are a team of graduate students who model and promote digital strategies to foster community engagement with the academic and scholarly work of the students, alumni, faculty, and staff of the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Each Program Social Media Fellow develops and aids in the maintenance of their program’s social media presence and is a resource to advise members of their program to plan and implement social media to share their work and promote events.

As a team, the social media fellows share ideas, explore new digital tools and strategies for engagement, develop methods of assessment, and to offer training to the Graduate Center community.

Social Mediums is a project of GC Digital Initiatives (GCDI) at The Graduate Center, CUNY. GCDI is a community of students, staff, and faculty distributed across centers, labs, initiatives, and academic programs who share an interest in digital scholarship and research. We offer events, workshops, office hours, faculty consultations, week-long institutes, and community-based working groups. Learn more about GCDI, our upcoming programming and how you can get involved on the GCDI website.

Current Fellows

Kalle Westerling, Theatre and Performance

Kalle Westerling is a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he works on a dissertation about the history and aesthetics of male-identified bodies in 20th-century burlesque and 21st-century boylesque. He currently also coordinates the NEH-funded project “Expanding Communities of Practice,” aimed at helping to create infrastructure for digital humanities across several higher education institutions across the U.S.

Coordinator, Social Media Fellows.

Inna Bakman-Sanchez, Biochemistry Program

Inna is a Biochemistry Ph.D. Candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research focuses on the role of metal ions in biological systems, primarily zinc-finger transcription factors. In addition to her studies, Inna is invested in science education and outreach. She has been teaching Chemistry courses at Brooklyn College and volunteering in youth engagement efforts since 2013. Being a social media fellow for the Chemistry Program, Inna helps to improve city-wide networking for the chemistry department by extending its promotional reach and communicating event information and community highlights on various social media platforms. Her efforts help connect students and faculty at CUNY throughout the five boroughs of New York.

Beth Fera, Criminal Justice

Beth Fera is the PSMF for Criminal Justice. She is a fifth year doctoral student in the CJ program, the Research Operations Assistant for the Office for the Advancement of Research and the Academic Coordinator for the D.A.R.T. Program, at John Jay. She is also the Graduate Center Program Representative and serves on the Admissions Committee for the doctoral program. Beth will be defending her dissertation proposal in the Fall 2019, which examines cross-national indicators of punitiveness.

Huber D. Jaramillo Gil, Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures

Huber David Jaramillo Gil was born in Bogotá, Colombia and raised in New York. He is a Doctoral Candidate of Gender and Sexuality at the Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research interests include gender and sexuality, representation practices, and human rights discourses in late 20th century Latin America. His current research analyzes the ways in which trans people have been understood through verbal and visual baroque forms of representation in the social and cultural imaginary of Latin America. In addition to teaching elementary and intermediate courses in Spanish language, his courses have included “Masterworks of Spanish Literature” and “Gender and Sexuality in the Hispanic World”. He has also served as College Assistant for the Ph.D. Program in History and as Social Media Fellow for the Graduate Center Digital Initiatives. Through both roles, he has successfully used social media as an academic tool for dissemination of research and for public engagement.

Chelsea Lane, Music

Chelsea Lane is currently pursuing her D.M.A. in Music Performance (Harp) at The Graduate Center, CUNY. In addition to her duties as a student, Chelsea gives private harp lessons, performs in orchestral, chamber and solo concerts, and teaches Introduction to Music History at the College of Staten Island, CUNY as an adjunct lecturer.

Parisa Marzieh Setayesh, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Geographer with a background in Architecture and Urbanism. Interested in the intersection of design issues with climate-change and the socio-ecological challenges of climate change. Read more on her website.

Maya Rose, Educational Psychology

Maya Rose is pursuing a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Prior to entering the program, she worked on the evidence development team at an educational technology startup that designed video games to improve attention. Her current research examines how test variations and individual differences effect adult second language acquisition. For her dissertation, she is creating a computer assisted language learning platform to teach Turkish grammar and vocabulary in order to pinpoint the most effective methods for second language learning. This work aims to have border implications for resettling populations and CUNY students acquiring a variety of second languages. She is also interested in designing and assessing cognitive game-based trainings and researching the development of behavioral and neuropsychological indices of executive functions.

B Stone, Political Science

B Stone is a doctoral candidate in political science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. B’s research interests include American political culture, discourse analysis, and critical addiction studies. B’s current project, “Pathologies of Power: An Ordinary Language Analysis of Addiction,” is an exploration of how the term “addiction” is used to further political projects by framing policy issues as impending crises of collective willpower and independence. B is also a former teaching fellow at Baruch College, CUNY and adjunct instructor at Brooklyn College, CUNY.

Jennifer Stoops, Urban Education

Jennifer Stoops is a doctoral candidate in the Urban Education program and the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy certificate program. Her research focuses on technology, sustainability, the commons, critical pedagogy, and alternative/informal education, with particular interest in the maker movement in urban education. Jennifer is the Communications Director for the American Educational Studies Association, a professional organization committed to the study of social foundations of education. She has been the Urban Education Social Media Fellow since 2012.

Jennifer was the co-author (with Erin Glass) of the winning NEH Digital Start-Up Grant proposal to launch Social Paper, a socialized writing environment developed by and for the CUNY Academic Commons. She also co-organized (with Michael Mandiberg) a year-long series on the theoretical and political repercussions of education outside of traditional institutions, Experiments in Extra-Institutional Education, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center. Jennifer has served on numerous committees at the Graduate Center including: the Urban Education Executive Committee, the Urban Education Search Committee, the Steering Committee for the Urban Education Students’ Association, OpenCUNY, and the Urban Education journal—Theory, Research, and Action in Urban Education. Prior to joining the Ph.D. program in Urban Education, she taught middle school English Language Arts as a New York City Teaching Fellow in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

James Tolleson, Anthropology

James Tolleson is a Ph.D. student in cultural anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received a B.A. in Ethnic Studies (Interdisciplinary program) from Davidson College. Broadly, his work seeks to draw connections between critical race studies, economic anthropology, and the anthropology of space and place, with a focus on the southern United States. His current research explores the articulations of race and capital in the 20th-century agricultural and land development of south Florida, paying particular attention to changing regimes of racial governance, labor, and finance. He has taught at Hunter College (CUNY) and currently works as a Social Media Fellow for the GC Anthropology Program.

Sejung Sage Yim, Sociology

Sejung Sage Yim is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her main research interests include immigration, race and ethnicity, and transnationalism focusing on contemporary immigrants’ experiences in the United States. Sejung currently teaches social statistics at Queens College, and she also works part-time at the Research Center for Korean Community (RCKC) at Queens College, where she is involved in various quantitative and qualitative projects related to the Korean American population.