Natasha Williams

Natasha Williams is a critical scholar of digital media and international relations. She is interested in the role of social media, digital platforms, and technology in global culture and politics.

Natasha Williams is a University Fontaine Fellow & joint doctoral student in Communication and Political Science at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Political Science in the School of Arts and Sciences.

Williams’ scholarship brings a critical cultural perspective to digital media, culture, and global politics. Her work analyzes how digital culture on social media platforms discursively narrates, performs, and arbitrates issues of political and cultural import. She has particular experience studying Instagram and TikTok, as well as the role of influencer culture in today’s media ecology. As of late, her ongoing research agenda has a strong interest and focus on studying the rise of “war influencers” on social media and how they bear witness to global crises around the world, such as war, conflict, and colonial violence. 

Williams’ research interventions consider the conjunctural situatedness of her phenomena of interest — from the cultural production process of digital artifacts to their reception in the broader public sphere — all while holding central ascending logics of neoliberal capitalism, fascism, populism, and authoritarianism positioning culture and politics in the world today. 

Williams’ research is also rooted in mixed methodologies and an appreciation for multimodal media. She leverages a wide array of methods, from the interpretive to the computational, in order to variably and appropriately address an increasingly complex media landscape. Williams additionally takes seriously all mediated discursive forms: the visual, the textual, the sonic, the affective, and the imaginaries constructed therein. She further approaches all of her work from a critically oriented and reflexive positionality, inspired and guided by decolonial and feminist thought leaders.

At Penn, Williams is a Doctoral Fellow with the Center for Media at Risk and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. She is also a member of Dr. Deen Freelon's Politics, Identity, and Communication Lab. Prior to attending the University of Pennsylvania, Williams worked in private research. She received her Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Economics summa cum laude from New York University, and her Master of Arts in Communication from the Annenberg School. 

She is also a proud first-gen college student and educator. Williams is committed to uplifting and mentoring young scholars and peers around her and to making the higher education experience more accessible and intelligible.