PhD student Rohan Grover

Rohan Grover

All But Dissertation

Rohan Grover is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. His research explores the politics of technology policy. Specifically, his dissertation project examines the sociotechnical construction of "user consent" in the emerging privacy tech industry, which develops standards for data privacy and, increasingly, AI governance. His ethnographic research draws on science and technology studies, critical data studies, critical policy studies, and feminist and queer analysis of consent to unpack the politics of data governance and privacy law in action.

Grover's work has been published in New Media & Society, Political Communication, Telecommunications Policy, Information, Communication & Society, The Information Society, the Journal of Information Policy; and in conference proceedings for the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). His research has been supported by funding from the National Science Foundation as well as academic associations across disciplines such as the International Communication Association (ICA), the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and the American Political Science Association (APSA). His work has also been recognized with the James R. Cleary Prize for Student Media Law and Policy Research and with two Top Student Paper Awards at ICA.

Prior to joining Annenberg, Grover worked as a product manager and data strategist at digital media and advocacy organizations such as HuffPost, MoveOn, Planned Parenthood, Upworthy, and Jhatkaa.org. He received an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and a BS in Economics with a minor in Asian American studies from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.