Erika Polson

Since Privileged Mobilities came out in 2016, Dr. Polson has continued to research digital media and globalizing middle classes, often focusing on digital place-making practices of mobile people. Through a series of recent case studies, she has critically examined how location-aware platforms and social media serve to connect people (temporarily) to place through the production of experience, and how the growing market for experiences is altering boundaries and creating new and contested claims to places.

In a chapter written for Papacharissi's The Networked Self, Vol 2 (2018), Polson explores how, as travel experiences pass repetitively through social media channels, they seem increasingly staged or cliché; as travelers seek new ways of obtaining unique experiences, such authentic travel experiences are increasingly sought through efforts to “live like a local”. She critically considers how AirBnb, EatWith, Tinder, and similar apps are used to connect travelers to local experiences. In another chapter (in the Routledge Companion to Media & Class (2020) co-edited with Lynn Schofield Clark and Radhika Gajjala), she analyzes a range of discourses about being or becoming a digital nomad, critically considering them in a political-economic context of labor and mobility. More recently Dr. Polson co-authored a study of how AirBnb Experience hosts shifted their work to Online Experiences to help 'travelers' experience place through virtual experience in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, as part of a Special Issue on the topic of "digital placemaking" (which she co-edited with Germaine Halegoua) in the journal, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2021).

Closer to home, Polson examines street art murals in Denver’s RiNo Art District, and explores how practices of circulating the images on Instagram may play a role in the gentrification of the district for an article in a special issue of Space & Culture on the topic, "gentrification and the right to the geomedia city."