Dear AoIR members,

We are pleased to announce the winner of the AoIR2026 Dissertation Award:

Dr. Dominique Carlon

of the Queensland University of Technology

for "Bots and Other Platform Inhabitants: Stories of Inter-Bot Governance, Automated Play, and Pretest on Reddit"

Dr. Carlon produced this excellent dissertation at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society in the Digital Media Research Center within the School of Communication at the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education & Social Justice of the Queensland University of Technology. This novel digital ethnographic dissertation recognizes the bots on Reddit as active co-creators and cohabitants: “the thesis reveals how bots are agents of culture that enact, contribute to, enforce, and challenge the norms and expectations of digital communities” (Carlon). The significant contributions of the work build on past research and provide a firm foundation for future explorations of bot-inhabited digital spaces.

And announcing our two honorable mentions, in no particular order,

Dr. Abel Goncalves Guerra and Dr. Breigha Adeyemo

Dr. Abel Goncalves Guerra, from London School of Economics, wrote our first honorable mention, "Chasing Cites: Platforms and Knowledge-Making between Datafication and Lived Urban Histories". Using Uber as its primary case, Guerra develops an understanding of the relationship of networked cities in the global south providing a “critical understanding of how institutional actors and platform workers in a particular socio-historical context actively shape platformisation” (Abel). The dissertation reveals the operations of knowledge regarding the platformization of our lives in its contexts through an engaging set of methods.

Dr. Breigha Adeyemo, from the University of Illinois Chicago, wrote our second honorable mention, "System Override: A Critical Virtual Ethnography of Women of Color’s Digital Praxis in Horizon Worlds". Her study of women of colour in virtual worlds contributes significantly to the field and helps to, “bridge the gap between marginalized users' lived experiences and the design of virtual environments” (Adeyemo). Her work combines a variety of ethnographic methods, excellent research and solid literature reviews to provide a firm foundation for future work that will improve virtual worlds for women of colour and thus for everyone.

Please join us in sharing a big congratulations to Dr. Carlon, Dr. Guerra, and Dr. Adeyemo!

About This Year's Committee and Selection Process

We extend a huge thank you to this year's committee for all their work over the last few months. The international committee was comprised of Drs. Jeremy Hunsinger (Chair), Tanja Oblak Črnič, Alessandro Gandini, Lynn Schofield Clark, Admire Mare, Guobin Yang, and Bjørn Nansen.

We followed a three stage process in which each nominated dissertation was read by two different members. Those members chose one or more as the best, leading to six dissertations proceeding to the second stage, from which each reviewer provided a ranked list. From those ranked lists, we reached a consensus decision about our winner and honorable mentions.

The committee members were instructed to choose the best dissertations, focusing on the quality of scholarship and contribution to internet research/internet studies.