Germaine R Halegoua

Germaine R Halegoua serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies at the University of Kansas. Her academic work bridges media studies, geography, and digital culture with a particular focus on how digital technologies shape our relationship to place and space.

Her research interests span digital media, urban and community informatics, and cultural geographies of digital media. Dr. Halegoua examines how individuals use digital platforms to construct identity through place-based practices, with recent work analyzing travel selfies in South Korean contexts as digital placemaking that reveals cultural values and social position. Her scholarship critically engages with how digital media practices both conform to and contest neoliberal consumerist ideologies while expressing young people's imaginations about social hierarchies and class status.

Dr. Halegoua's recent publications include the monographs Smart Cities (MIT Press, 2020) and The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place (NYU Press, 2020), along with co-editing the anthology Locating Emerging Media (Routledge, 2016). Her current research examines travel selfies as digital placemaking practices in South Korea, analyzing how these images serve as political and performative expressions of identity.

Her scholarly contributions focus on understanding how digital media transforms our experience of place, with particular attention to identity performance in networked publics. Through textual and discourse analysis, she investigates how representations of international travel become sites where social hierarchies and national imaginaries are expressed and debated.