Department of Anthropology

Ben (he/him) is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist researching the internet and social media, gender and sexuality, and Muslim communities. His dissertation research focuses on how LGBTQ+ people of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) descent interact with the design features and community policies of social media platforms to shape changing conceptions of gender, sexuality, and social belonging within queer and Muslim publics.

He has previously worked as a Research Intern with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research on the Pronouns in the Workplace Project, studying the design and social impact of digital tools for sharing pronouns and expressing gender identity in workplace software.

He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco, the United States, and within online communities. Ben earned a BA in Anthropology and an MA in Religious Studies at the University of Kansas before beginning graduate studies at IU in the fall of 2017. His research has been funded by a College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Research Fellowship, a Rob Kling Social Informatics Fellowship, and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships for Arabic language study and research.