ATLANTA—Presidential Fellow Dr. Meredith Pruden successfully defended her dissertation June 25, 2021 and has accepted a post-doctoral research position with the University of North Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Pruden will be working on research to gauge the growing impact on society of the internet, social media and other digital communications.
Dr. Meredith Pruden
Pruden’s dissertation featured a mixed methods analysis (including qualitative and computational methods) about representations and discourses of the involuntary celibate (incel) movement. As a member of the Department of Communication, Pruden earned her Master of Arts degree in Communication from Georgia State and her Bachelor of Science in Communication from Kennesaw State University. She holds a minor in professional writing and recently completed a certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Pruden’s recent work, including her dissertation, uses mixed methods to focus on extremist masculinist groups and their entanglement with other far-right ideologies. She also served as a doctoral research assistant on a Facebook grant exploring the internationalization of far-right publics.
Pruden has published her research on conservative populism and journalistic practice in Communication, Culture and Critique, and in VISTA: Visual Culture Journal for which she researched memes as decolonial political struggle, and in the edited volume Misogyny and Media in the Age of Trump on mediated misogyny and conservative populism. She has forthcoming chapters in three edited volumes and is also a Fellow with the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism.