Assistant Professor Jeffrey Lane was named a “Select Honoree” at the 2019-2020 Chancellor’s and Provost’s Awards for Faculty Excellence ceremony hosted by Rutgers University-New Brunswick and held virtually on September 24, 2020. Lane was honored for receiving the 2019 Nancy Baym Book Award by the Association of Internet Researchers. 

“It was exciting to be recognized by the Chancellor and then to hear Dean Potter’s generous remarks followed by President Holloway’s address. I’m flattered and feel very fortunate that SC&I and Rutgers value and support ethnographic work as a way to understand communication, digital life, and inequalities in this world,” Lane said.

SC&I Dean Jonathan Potter said during the ceremony, “I am delighted to be here to celebrate Jeff Lane’s richly deserved faculty excellence award.  Jeff Lane studies communication and technology as it relates to urban life, criminal justice, and social inequality.  He uses ethnography – studying life as it happens; and he combines the ethnographic study of in-person communication and digital communication.  Notably, he is both using ethnography and also remaking it for the digital age.  His wonderful recent book – “The Digital Street” – won the prestigious Nancy Baym award.  It is a compelling study of disadvantaged girls and boys on the streets of Harlem, and the role social media plays in their lives.  And his work through New York’s Center for Court Innovation has informed new thinking about intervening with juvenile gangs.  Jeff has helped establish a digital ethnography working group in SC&I designed to catalyze new methods for understanding communication and information in an ever more digital environment.  We treasure him.”

Lane teaches courses in Urban Communication, Communication, Technology & Society, Mediated Communication, Qualitative Methods, and Ethnography.

More information about Lane is on the Rutgers School of Communication and Information website.

Discover more about the SC&I Communication Department here.