Affiliated Graduate Program Faculty Member

Jeffrey Lane is a digital urban ethnographer who writes about the ways in which online communication and community come together. His research integrates face-to-face and digital fieldwork to understand how social inequalities play out in neighborhoods, schools, courthouses, and other social settings. The Digital Street is the title and subject of his award-winning book with Oxford University Press on the digital communication that brokers street life. This ethnography, which received book awards from the American Sociological Association and the Association of Internet Researchers, shows how teenagers, neighborhood adults, and law enforcement in Harlem (NYC) use social media to manage neighborhood relationships and social order. Professor Lane previously wrote a book called Under the Boards (University of Nebraska Press) on the production of race, masculinity, and popular culture in the basketball industry. Before joining the faculty at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, he received his PhD in Sociology from Princeton University and was a fellow of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Professor Lane co-chairs the Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group (DEWG) and is a faculty associate of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as American Behavioral Scientist, New Media & Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Journal of Consumer Culture and written about in popular news outlets like The Atlantic and Vice.