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Photograph of Rohan Grover

Rohan Grover Assistant Professor SOC | Communication Studies

Contact
Rohan Grover
SOC | Communication Studies
4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW
McKinley Building
Additional Positions at AU
Faculty Fellow, Internet Governance Lab
Faculty Fellow, Center for Security, Innovation and New Technology
Degrees
PhD, Communication, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California
MA, Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
BS, Economics, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Bio
Rohan Grover (he/they) is Assistant Professor of AI and Media at American University’s School of Communication and a Non-Resident Fellow with the Center for Democracy and Technology. His research explores how media and technology industries translate public values into commercial products, thereby reconfiguring public interest work to serve private capital. Currently, he is especially interested in public interest intermediaries and the political economy of technocratic expertise.

His current book project, tentatively titled Manufacturing User Consent: The Social Life of Data Privacy Law in Action, is under contract with the University of California Press. It draws on ethnographic research in the privacy tech industry to demonstrate the unanticipated politics of implementing and translating data privacy law on the ground. The dissertation upon which the book is based was selected as a finalist for the Best Dissertation Award from the Society of Business Ethics.

Grover's research has been published in journals such as New Media & Society, Political Communication, the International Journal of Communication, Telecommunications Policy, the Journal of Information Policy, The Information Society, and at CHI. His work has been supported by two NSF-funded grants in the areas of research translation and law & science. His research has been recognized with the James R. Cleary Prize for Student Media Law & Policy Research as well as top paper awards from the International Communication Association. He has also received support from major funders across the fields of communication, computing, political science, and media studies. Previously, Grover was a product manager and data strategist at digital media and political advocacy organizations including HuffPost, MoveOn, Planned Parenthood, and Upworthy.

Grover is currently accepting PhD students. Please feel free to reach out if you are interested in pursuing a PhD in Communication.
See Also
Personal Website
Google Scholar
For the Media
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Teaching

Fall 2025

  • COMM-365 Digital Media and Culture

  • COMM-514 Censorship and Media

Spring 2026

  • COMM-365 Digital Media and Culture

Fall 2026

  • COMM-514 Censorship and Media

  • COMM-760 Seminar in Doctoral Research

Scholarly, Creative & Professional Activities

Selected Publications

Grover, R. (2025). When user consent fails: How platforms undermine data governance. International Journal of Communication, 19, 1814–1820.

Grover, R., Widera, J., & Ananny, M. (2025). Data disaffection: Toward a relational and affective understanding of datafication. New Media & Society.

Grover, R. (2024). Encoding privacy: Sociotechnical dynamics of data protection compliance work. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Grover, R. & Baik, J. S. (2024). Platforms as templates: Emerging datafication dynamics in digital news outlets’ datawalls. The Information Society, 40(4), 260–276.

Grover, R., Jang, K., & Su, L. W. (2024). Beyond digital protection(ism)? Comparing data governance frameworks in Asia. Journal of Information Policy, 14, 161–193.

Grover, R. (2023). Contingent connectivity: Internet shutdowns and the infrastructural precarity of digital citizenship. New Media & Society, 27(1), 359–378.

Grover, R. & Kuo, R. (2023). Destabilizing race: Social movements as sites of political imagination. Political Communication, 40(4), 484–503.

Grover, R. (2022). The geopolitics of digital rights activism: Evaluating civil society’s role in the promises of multistakeholder internet governance. Telecommunications Policy, 46(10).