Ross, Sandy L. | United Kingdom

Sandy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is not nearly as grumpy as this photograph suggests. Her doctoral research, "Everyday Economists", ethnographically explores lay theories of economic life in virtual worlds, bringing ordinary people's pluralistic and heteroglossic economic theories into dialogue with more monological and constrained academic formulations of "the economy". At IAS-STS, she will start work on a new project, "Invisible Ecological Costs", exploring how users of energy-intensive online services understand the ecological knock-on effects of virtual consumption, and how governments and ecological activists can most effectively communicate these issues to lay audiences.

In addition to these two projects, Sandy is also working with Shahanah Schmid (doctoral candidate, BIOS Research Centre, LSE) on a comparative investigation of women's use of online support groups for chronic illness, entitled "Invisible and Disembodied: Infertility and Chronic Pain Health Work Using ICTs". This work is part of a larger research project headed by Prof. Art Frank (University of Calgary, University of Toronto), and funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant.

Project at IAS-STS: Invisible Ecological Costs

This research explores end user, or consumer, understandings of the hidden environmental costs of online services, particularly social networking and sharing sites. Proliferating forms of social networking media, digital entertainment and virtual consumption present themselves to consumers as environmentally sustainable, with minimal production costs or ecological impact. However, in reality the technological infrastructures supporting these objects and modes of consumption embody tremendous ecological impacts, from heavy energy use to use of dwindling supplies of rare earth minerals and pollution created in production. This research has two interdependent objectives: evaluating how lay users of popular social networking sites and virtual worlds understand the environmental costs of those activities and the infrastructures upon which they depend; and how information about energy use and ecological costs can be effectively communicated – by businesses, users themselves, climate change organisations or governments – in a way that is intelligible to lay audiences. I also aim to provide three types of outcomes: an original scholarly contribution; recommendations for communicating the environmental costs of ICTs to various constituencies; and increasing the profile of these issues in public debate. Data will be generated through qualitative semi-structured interviews; site visits to data centres; analysis of texts produced by environmental organisations, online service providers, ecological corporate social responsibility projects within the IT sector; and quantitative data on energy consumption and efficiency produced by environmental groups, ICT infrastructure producers and suppliers and service providing companies.

Selected publications

Review Essays
2008. “George Loewenstein: Exotic Preferences: Behavioural Economics and Human Motivation.” Sociologický časopis (Czech Sociological Review). 6(2008):1200-1204.

Conference papers
with Shahanah Schmid. 2010. “Virtually Healthy: Locating nature, gender and illness in virtual bodies.” 4th Christina Conference on Gender Studies, Helsinki, Finland.

2010. “It’s ‘sick’ to be ill: Assessing the impact of online patient support groups.” Social Networking in Cyberspace Conference, University of Wolverhampton. UK.

2008. “Playing the Market: Negotiating Normative and Subversive Market Practices in an Online Economy.” International Forum of Sociology. Barcelona, Spain

2007. “Two Models of Sociability: Simmel Goes Online.” LSE Department of Sociology Annual Conference, Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, UK.

Book reviews
2009. “The Comfort of Things – Daniel Miller.” British Journal of Sociology. 60(4):841-843.

2007. “Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions – Lucy Suchman.” British Journal of Sociology. 58(4):732-733.

Mass media publications
2009. “The Internet’s Dirty Carbon Secret.” The Guardian. Dec. 6, 2009. Accessible at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/dec/06/internet-dirty-secret-emissions-data