“How can we change the world?”

I’ve spent the past 20 year learning and practicing diverse methods of answering this question.

US Politics

I worked on my first presidential campaign for Bill Bradley while still a high school student in New Jersey and volunteered as a Congressional intern for Tennessee Democrat Harold Ford, Jr. while in college. Six years later, I was New Media Operations Manager for President Obama’s national campaign in 2008, where I managed logistics for the 60-person new media department at campaign headquarters in Chicago. 

US Activism

For the 2018 midterm elections, I crisscrossed the country, volunteering for twenty Congressional candidates in swing districts from Washington and Colorado to Missouri and New York, all the while keeping a video diary of my travels. In the summer of 2020, I was a volunteer at the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) in Seattle in response to disproportionate violence by Seattle police following the murder of George Floyd. I had previously traveled to Ferguson, MO in 2014 to participate in Black Lives Matter mobilizations following the murder of Mike Brown.

International Politics and Activism

My interest in politics is international. I interned in the media department of the United Nations Association in New York in 2003 and was a Programs Assistant at the National Democratic Institute in Morocco 2004-5, while a Fulbright Scholar there. In my twenties, I was a digital activism consultant, traveling the world to give talks and train activists in the use of digital tools for social change, working in such countries as Lebanon, Croatia, Mexico, and Turkey. I’ve also lived in India and Ghana. I speak or have learned six languages other than English: French, Spanish, Arabic, Latin, Hindi, and Twi, in order of fluency.

Digital Activism Writing

I first became interested in the political effects of technology while living in Morocco. I saw the powerful effect of social media and blogs — both relatively new at the time — to give a global stage to activists with few financial resources. My first public work in the this area, The Election Blogging Guide (2006), was written with Zephyr Teachout and Solana Larsen, and was followed by Blog for a Cause! (2007), which I wrote for the citizen media nonprofit Global Voices. In 2017-2018 I was was the project manager for VR Action Lab, a project that experimented with the social impact affordances of VR to combat youth bullying.

Digital Activism Research

In 2012 I co-founded the Digital Activism Research Project at the University of Washington, while I was a Graduate Research Fellow of the National Science Foundation. There, I led a team that developed the Global Digital Activism Data Set, a first-of-its-kind event data set of over 1,500 digital activism campaigns from 151 countries. I was also the editor of the book Digital Activism Decoded (2010). In 2007-8 I was Research Assistant at the Internet & Democracy Project at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Early qualitative research experience includes interview-based reports on democracy activism in Morocco (2005) my Fulbright final project, and online citizen journalism and the 2002 South Korean presidential election (2007) for the Berkman Klein Center. More recently, I wrote a report on social movements and transparency (2015), based on interviews with transparency activists around the world, for the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, which is a donor collaborative.

Education

I hold a MA in communication from the University of Washington. My academic training also includes graduate work in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, undergraduate work in history and Africana studies at Vassar College and the University of Ghana, and a certificate in the advanced study of nonviolent conflict from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict’s summer institute at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Today

Today, I am the founder of Do Big Good, a human-centered design firm that uses co-design methods and social justice principles to help clients create change with community. I live in Seattle, where I enjoy biking and intentional communities. Formerly known as Mary Joyce, I changed my name to Mer (she/her) in 2020 to better reflect my androgynous gender.