Sandra Braman Ph.D.

Sandra Braman

Scholar and Professor

Department
  • Media & Information
bramansa@msu.edu
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Bio

Sandra Braman's research on the macro-level effects of the use of digital technologies and their policy implications has been supported by the US National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the First Amendment Fund. She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA), former Chair of the ICA Communication Law & Policy Division, and former Head of the International Association of Media, Communication, and Research Law Section.

Before joining MSU, Sandra served most recently as the John Paul Abbott Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. Her research has been honored internationally since a paper from her MA thesis won an AEJMC student research award. Most recently, she received the 2022 ICA Edwin C. Baker Award for research on media, markets, and democracy and her 2006 book Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power (The MIT Press) received the 2022 ICA Fellows Book Award for a book of enduring value.

Roles

Senior Scholar and Advisory Board Member, Quello Center for Media and Information Policy
Editor, Information Policy Book Series, The MIT Press
Fellow, International Communication Association
Affiliate Faculty, Ostrom Workshop, Indiana University

Related Work

Research

Current work looks at facts and their processing in US law in two complementary projects.  Analysis of the over 1,000 federal statutes that criminalize falsity is eliciting a framework from existing law that will be of use as we continue to think about how to govern disinformation. Analysis of the ways in which US constitutional law distinguishes among types of information processing for purposes of differential legal treatment will do the same for the governance of algorithms and AI.

Selected Publications

The terms: The parameters of information economics. In Daphne R. Raban & Julia Wlodarczyk (Eds.), The Elgar companion to information economics, pp. 503-530. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024.

Ecstasy and entropy: Information policy in a punctuated case. In Alastair S. Duff (Ed.), Research handbook on information policy, pp. 40-55. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021.

The irony of Internet governance research: Metagovernance as context. In Laura DeNardis, Nanette Levinson, Francesca Musiani, & Derrick Cogburn (Eds.), Researching Internet governance: Methods, frameworks, futures, pp. 21-58. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.

The medium as power: Information and its flows as acts of war. In Cherian George (Ed.), Communicating with power, pp. 3-22. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, International Communication Association Theme Book Series, 2017.

Instability and Internet design, Internet Policy, 5(3), 2016, doi: 10.14763/2016.3.429, 2016

The geopolitical and the network political: Internet designers and governance, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 9(2), 277-296, 2014.

The ideal vs. the real in media localism: Regulatory implications. Communication, Law, and Policy, 12(3), 231-278, 2007.

The micro- and macroeconomics of information, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), 40, 3-52, 2005

Posthuman law: Information policy and the machinic world, First Monday, http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_12/braman/index.html, 2002.

Related Work

Interviews in peer reviewed scholarly journals:

Interview (with Edilene M. da Silva & J. C. R. Garcia), Revista Informaçao & Sociedade Estudos (Journal of Information and Society Studies, Brazil), 2017.

FM interviews Sandra Braman (with Ed Valauskas), First Monday.

Biokaoottinen jarjestys: Sandra Braman haastattellu (Chaos and power: An interview with Sandra Braman) (with Paivi Pontinen), Tiedotusktutkimus (Journal of Communication, Finland), 2, 113-120, 1994.

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