Dr. Nicol Turner Lee is the recipient of the 2025 Morris Rosenberg Award for Outstanding Sociological Achievement from the DC Sociological Society.

Sociology has had limited engagement with structural studies of media and technology, although this has shifted in recent years. By contrast, Dr. Turner Lee has focused on these subfields for many years through her applied work. In her most recent roles, she has amplified sociological perspectives regarding inequality and social justice within technology policy circles, and she often speaks publicly on these topics in a clear and approachable manner.

In 2024, Dr. Turner Lee published Digitally Invisible: How the Internet Is Creating the New Underclass. The book offers a robust view of the digital inequities experienced by multiple communities in the United States. It engages with the sociological imagination and the always present tension of structure and agency. For example, although she calls out the ways that the digitally invisible are “trapped by their demography, geography, and circumstance,” Dr. Turner Lee centers efforts led by local mobilizers to balance policy debates with local community needs in addressing digital inequity — “[people] who are steadfast within their institutions and communities even when everything else is shuttering around them…”

Nicol Turner Lee is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, the director of the Center for Technology Innovation, and serves as co-editor-in-chief of the TechTank blog and the TechTank Podcast. She graduated from Colgate University magna cum laude and has an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University.

DCSS will present Dr. Turner Lee with the Rosenberg Award at the 2025 awards celebration on April 30. We encourage all DCSS members and supporters to attend!