• Leslie Kay Jones
  • Leslie Kay Jones
  • Assistant Professor
  • Office: Davison Hall, 131
  • Dr. Leslie Kay Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers New Brunswick, specializing in social movements. She draws extensively on the fields of race and gender, critical race theory, and online social media in her study of collective mobilization. She teaches qualitative and computer assisted research methods, particularly digital ethnography and content analysis.

    Leslie’s recent article, BlackLivesMatter: An Analysis of the Movement as Social Drama, proposes a theoretical model for the role of the Black Twitter counterpublic in mediating the frames of #BlackLivesMatter protests. Her working manuscript argues that Black women are forming intellectual salons through online social media, in which they are making groundbreaking theoretical contributions toward the public understanding of race and gender.

    Leslie is an interdisciplinary scholar that is active in the digital humanities and digital sociologies communities. She co-directs the Digital Sociology Collective with Drs. Rachel Durso (Washington College) and Francesca Tripodi (UNC).

    As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, she held fellowships at the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy (2018-2019) and the Price Lab for Digital Humanities (2017-2018)

    In 2016, she began co-ordinating the Digital Sociology Mini-Conference as part of the Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting, an initiative first started in 2015 by Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom. In 2020, the Digital Sociology Mini-Conference became the 1st Annual Digital Sociology unconference, independently hosted by the newly named Digital Sociology Collective.

  • In the Public Eye:
  • Faculty Article(s):
  • #BlackLivesMatter: An Analysis of the Movement as Social Drama
  • Program Areas:
  • Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment
  • Politics and Social Movements
  • Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration