Kira Allmann

Biography

Kira Allmann is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Media Law and Policy at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. Her current research examines how different internet ownership models enable or curtail the realization of fundamental human rights. Her work explores how communities at the margins of the web create innovative solutions to achieve internet access, challenging the corporate and state ownership models of internet provision. Working with community networks — built, administered, and maintained by local communities — Kira's research interrogates alternative infrastructural, regulatory, and political answers to the digital divide.

Kira is also the Communications Director at the Oxford Human Rights Hub and a research partner of the Whose Knowledge? campaign, which works to center the knowledge of marginalized communities on the web and raise awareness of the digital exclusions that keep the majority of the world from participating fully in digital knowledge creation and curation.

She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where her dissertation focused on how mobility between online and offline spaces constituted a practice of resistance during and after the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Between 2011 and 2015, Kira conducted ethnographic research in Egypt, blending online and offline qualitative methods, to investigate how the use of digital technologies by Egyptian youth were transforming virtual and physical spaces in the city of Cairo. 

Education

DPhil, Oriental Studies (Islamic World), University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

MPhil (with Distinction), Modern Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

BA, Government and Linguistics, The College of William and Mary, Virginia, USA

Twitter: @KiraAllmann