Muira McCammon is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication and a master’s in law candidate at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She studies how detention takes shape in the everyday lives of people whose job is to sustain it, focusing on U.S. military servicemembers and their families and communities at Guantánamo. She is particularly interested in how social media connects active-duty personnel with urban spaces during their deployment. With support from the Annenberg School of Communication’s Center for Media at Risk and the Media, Inequality, and Change Center, she is examining the legal and economic challenges Philadelphia journalists face in obtaining government documents and data through Right to Know requests.

Under the auspices of the Beinecke Scholarship, McCammon received an M.A. in Translation Studies/Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she wrote her thesis on the history of the Guantánamo Bay Detainee Library. Additionally, she holds a B.A. in French/Francophone Studies and a B.A. in Political Science/International Relations from Carleton College. She has previously held fellowships at the Sitka Fellows Program, the Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab, and the Turkish Fulbright Commission. Before beginning her doctoral program, McCammon worked as a freelance investigative reporter and covered issues in defense and technology for VICE, Slate, and others.

Publications

McCammon, M. (2015). “A Short History of the Gitmo Undersea Cable No One Is Talking About.”Slate Magazine, October 2. https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/the-undersea-internet-cable-connecting-the-u-s-and-guantanamo-bay.html

McCammon, M. (2016). Stories, Scandals, and Censorship: Telling the Story of the Guantánamo Bay Detainee Library Facilities. The Massachusetts Review, 57(3), 463-487.

McCammon, M. (2018). “Federal Agencies Have Far Too Much Leeway to Delete Tweets.” Slate Magazine, April 17. https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/can-federal-agencies-really-just-delete-tweets.html.

McCammon, M. with N. Bell. (2018). Competing Visions of the Global Order Colloquium Report, Perry World House. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QVBxBCRU096eE6YozvsYNnbdKx6UZQ4K/view