Helen Webley-Brown

I am a S.M. student in Political Science at MIT with specializations in American Politics and Quantitative Methods. I am also an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University. In 2022, I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a A.B. in Political Science. This cycle, I will be applying to Ph.D. programs.

Although my research focuses on the US, I grew up in London, England. I moved across the pond for college via the US-UK Fulbright Commission’s wonderful Sutton Trust US Programme. My personal background has greatly shaped my commitment to inclusive pedagogy, social mobility, and widening access to higher education.

Currently, my research agenda fits into two broad buckets:

  1. The socio-political effects of interacting with local institutions of social control, focusing on the criminal legal system and public housing authorities.
  2. How emerging technologies change the way people experience and perceive the state.

At the intersection of this, I am interested in the participatory implications of tools like pretrial electronic monitors and ShotSpotter in policing, and Landlord Tech in subsidized housing. Parallel to studies of demobilization, I also ask what fosters successful collective action in these contentious spaces? That is, under what conditions can marginalized communities carve out democratic practices within systems that control, surveil, or punish them? I have two early-stage projects that grapple with this question: one uses topic modelling to analyze Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) legislation, while the other leverages a novel dataset to examine resident council emergence in public housing developments.

Helen Webley-Brown

I am a S.M. student in Political Science at MIT with specializations in American Politics and Quantitative Methods. I am also an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University. In 2022, I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a A.B. in Political Science. This cycle, I will be applying to Ph.D. programs.

Although my research focuses on the US, I grew up in London, England. I moved across the pond for college via the US-UK Fulbright Commission’s wonderful Sutton Trust US Programme. My personal background has greatly shaped my commitment to inclusive pedagogy, social mobility, and widening access to higher education.

Currently, my research agenda fits into two broad buckets:

  1. The socio-political effects of interacting with local institutions of social control, focusing on the criminal legal system and public housing authorities.
  2. How emerging technologies change the way people experience and perceive the state.

At the intersection of this, I am interested in the participatory implications of tools like pretrial electronic monitors and ShotSpotter in policing, and Landlord Tech in subsidized housing. Parallel to studies of demobilization, I also ask what fosters successful collective action in these contentious spaces? That is, under what conditions can marginalized communities carve out democratic practices within systems that control, surveil, or punish them? I have two early-stage projects that grapple with this question: one uses topic modelling to analyze Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) legislation, while the other leverages a novel dataset to examine resident council emergence in public housing developments.