Whitney O'Connell

Whitney is an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and is currently serving in the rank of Major.  She is a multi-generational New Orleanian, as well as a member of the United Houma Nation Tribe.  In 2010, Whitney graduated from LSU with a dual degree and embarked on her first military assignment at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Here, Whitney conducted human factors research on the F-35 aircraft, ensuring an intuitive human-vehicle interface in the cockpit of this groundbreaking fifth-generation fighter aircraft.  Then, she was assigned to 8th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg in North Carolina where she protected U.S. interests by strengthening the resilience and socio-economic stability of our foreign partner nations and their citizens, primarily in the South American and Indo-Pacific regions.  In this role, she deployed twice to Afghanistan in 2015 and 2016, and supported diplomatic missions in four countries across Central America. Next, Whitney served as an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Studies at the University of New Hampshire, where she had the privilege to teach and mentor future Air Force leaders. At her previous assignment, Whitney served at United States Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida, where she liaised with Joint Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense to develop policy and advised deployed military units as they managed socio-political projects in urban communities across the globe. Whitney has planned, conducted, and assessed quasi-experimental, mixed-methods research in support of numerous U.S. foreign policy objectives, with some recent analysis directly supporting a National Security Council policy decision.  Most recently, Whitney was competitively selected by the Air Force to earn her PhD in Sociology at Tulane University.

Whitney is interested in studying the impacts of how social media facilitates and, over time, has changed the employment of collective social action.  Her initial research will examine the Men’s Rights Movement as a case study and will specifically look at how the use of emotional and moral-emotional language impacts content engagement online.