Best Student Paper Award, Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)

The 2023 AoIR Student Paper Award has been awarded to Nermin Elsherif for her paper “The Not-so-revolutionary Facebook: Nostalgia and the return to a centralized state.”

Specifically, we selected this paper because of the author’s use of multi-year ethnographic research involving largely men in their 60s to examine the use of Facebook to promote nostalgia for an imagined utopian past following the 2011 revolution. This allows her to push back against western-centric scholarship that has largely focused on the “modernizing” potential of digital technologies in postcolonial contexts and digital media studies focus on youth.