Sociology and Anthropology
Visiting Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Boston College
Fields: Racism, Racecraft, Gender, Strategies for Social Change, and Digital Communities
Email: seddy@holycross.edu
Office: Beaven 206
Office Phone: 508-793-3597
PO Box: 50A
Biography
Samantha Eddy earned her PhD from Boston College. Her research and teaching examine racism, sexism, feminist and anti-racist strategies for sustained change, and digital communities. During her doctoral program, her research was funded by the Macarthur Foundation’s Research Network on Connected Learning. As a member of the Connected Consumption and Connected Economics Project, she researched belonging, inequity, and the potential for change through digital cooperatives. Her research appeared in Sociologica. Most recently, her research on digital cooperatives was published in After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back. This book was awarded the 2020 Porchlight Management and Workplace Culture publication of the year.
Samantha’s doctoral research explored how anti-racist efforts can be co-opted, pivoting from dismantling racism to redefining “race”. She investigated this through the Live Action Role Play community. Live Action Role Players embody the table-top worlds of dungeons and dragons through extensive sets, props, and costumes. This material embodiment scaffolds their collaborative, improvisational play. She compared this community’s treatment of race with their inclusive approaches to gender identity. Her research found that this community could effectively support gender exploration and marginalized genders. However, they were deeply invested in racecraft, framing race as a necessary social category wherein racism results from “racial differences”. While traditional gender roles were explicitly abandoned during these games, race was viewed as a key mechanism for generating difference and making these fictional worlds “feel real”. This work considered the complex strategies needed to simultaneously perform feminist and anti-racist interventions. Her research on this community was published in Humanities and awarded the Severyn T. Bruyn Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Economy and Social Justice.
More recently, Samantha has merged research interests to explore online engagement, virtual interfaces, and new forms of digital oppression and exclusion. Samantha is also an involved and passionate teacher. She has taught introductory courses as well as classes on gender, race, social problems, research methods, and digital communities. She was awarded Boston College’s Donald White Teaching Excellence Award as well as the Dean’s Teaching Fellowship, in recognition of her inclusive and equity-oriented teaching.