About Me
Hi there! I’m Brad Limov, a postdoc in media, AI, and ethics at the University of Texas at Austin currently associated with the Good Systems “Being Watched” project. In a nutshell, my work examines how social movements and emerging tech like generative AI influence media practices and industry norms. I have a particular interest in communities of practice and how they interact within online spaces and offline at events.
For Being Watched, I am examining these social processes as they pertain to public institutions and the adoption of AI and surveillance technologies.
You can follow me on Twitter and find my research on Google Scholar or Research Gate.
As a publicly engaged scholar and educator, I often reflect on how my research can be useful to the communities that I study, teach, and participate in. The work I do is primarily ethnographic, grounded in gatherings and conversations where consensus that underpins media practice forms. I seek to understand where ideas about social justice originate, how these ideas are communicated, and what possibilities for a more just society arise amid new technologies and shifts in political economy.
I received my PhD from the School of Journalism and Media at UT-Austin. My dissertation, Media Industry Events as Platforms for Social Justice: Moving from Inspiration to Impact in Creative Production, details how the problems identified and solutions proposed by social justice movements appear within discourses on practice at media festivals and conferences, as well as the ways talk translates into action within or adjacent to industrial constraints. You can find a recent publication on one of my case studies in Critical Studies in Media Communication. Earlier work appeared in NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies.
My other research complements this dissertation by investigating the interactions between news practices and social justice movements. This work, which benefited from research appointments and fellowships at UT-Austin with the Technology and Information Policy Institute and the Solidarity Journalism Initiative at the Center for Media Engagement, addresses how activist organizing receives public attention through media by examining the normative practices of journalists and activists at local and event-specific levels. This collaborative work is ongoing and has resulted in publications in Information, Communication & Society and Media and Communication.
I lived abroad for seven years prior to my arrival in Austin, first in China and then in Japan. During that time, I worked as an English language instructor and translator and received an MA in Cinema Studies from Nagoya University. My interest in cultures foreign to me and global media flows led to my first publication in the International Journal of Communication on US audiences for film and television produced abroad. While restrictions that came with the COVID-19 pandemic led to a focus on US-based case studies for my ethnographic work, I intend to return my scholarly attention to transpacific media and geopolitics in the future. In particular, the emerging multipolar world order and what it means for human rights and social justice as understood by the media makers and technology users I study is an interest of mine.