Editor in Chief: Matthew Zook
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, US| Matthew Zook is an economic and information geographer who researches technological change and the associated spatial structures and practices of society and economy. His recent work focuses on how big data and digital technologies are changing cities and the spatial economy including how they provide new ways to study cities and their implications for urban governance and policy. He examines how data, code, space and place interact as people increasingly use mobile, digital technologies in the hybrid, digitally augmented places that cities are becoming. |  |
Managing Editor: Jennifer Gabrys
Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK| Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Planetary Praxis research group and is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, Smart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies. Her newest book, Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle, was published by University of Minnesota Press in November 2022 and is available open access on Manifold. She co-edits the “Planetarities” short-monograph series published through Goldsmiths Press. Her work can be found at planetarypraxis.org and jennifergabrys.net. |  |
Co-Editors
Rocco Bellanova
Research Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium| Rocco Bellanova’s work sits at the intersection of politics, law and science & technology studies. He is the Principal Investigator of the research project DATAUNION, funded by the European Research Council (2022-2027). This project explores how the actual implementation of database interoperability informs European security integration. He has co-edited special issues on digital sovereignty (2022), science and technology in security practices (2020) and scholarly practices of critique (2019). His research is increasingly focusing on algorithmic violence and the security politics of data infrastructures. |  |
Dhiraj Murthy
| Dhiraj Murthy is a sociologist of new media. His research is primarily focused around social media in diverse contexts – journalism, health, ethnicity/race, and disasters. He has pioneered innovative methods in big data, including qualitative/mixed methods. He has also researched and published extensively on virtual organizations. Dr. Murthy has authored over 40 articles, book chapters, and papers and a book about Twitter, the first on the subject (published by Polity Press, 2013). |  |
Sung-Yueh Perng
Associate Professor, Institute of Science, Technology and Society, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan| Sung-Yueh Perng is an interdisciplinary social scientist drawing upon science and technology studies, human and cultural geographies, mobilities studies, urban studies, and design studies for theoretical inspiration. His research focuses on the incorporation of digital and data-driven innovations into urban everyday life and governance, having conducted case studies in Dublin and Boston and expanding his research on East Asian cities and countries. |  |
Sachil Singh
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Science, York University, Canada| Sachil Singh is a sociologist whose main areas of study are medical sociology, critical race studies and surveillance. The common thread in his work is attention to the racial outcomes of digital sorting technologies, which has allowed him to research topics as varied as credit scoring in South Africa and healthcare in Canada. His current work examines the extent to which healthcare practitioners in Canada rely on pithy conclusions about race and ethnicity from medical apps to inform patient diagnosis and treatment. |  |
Ana Valdivia
Lecturer in AI, Government & Policy based at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII).| Ana Valdivia investigates how datafication is transforming social, economic, and political worlds. Building on her experience as a mathematician and computer scientist, her interest lies in investigating power relationships in algorithmic governance and how public and private actors are fuelling the future with AI. Her current work examines the lifecycle of algorithms: from the mineral extractivism, data centres and electronic waste dumps. Also, she is investigating how AI is implemented in the context of migration and gender-based violence. In the past, Ana received the Postdoctoral Enrichment Award by the Alan Turing Institute. Ana's research is also connected with civic organisations such as AlgoRace. |  |
Jing Zeng
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich, Switzerland| Jing Zeng is an Assistant Professor of Digital Methods and Critical Data Studies at Utrecht University. With a background in Media and Communication studies, her research concerns the sociocultural implications of datafication and digital platforms in varied socio-political and cultural contexts. Jing has written extensively about social media platforms, around topics of misinformation, platform governance and digital culture. Her co-authored book TikTok: Creativity and Culture in Short Video is published by Polity in 2022. Her current projects include investigating public imaginaries of artificial intelligence, online conspiracy theories, and short-video platforms. |  |
Co-Editors - Demos
Richard is a Web epistemologist, an area of study where the main claim is that the Web is a knowledge culture distinct from other media. Rogers concentrates on the research opportunities that would have been improbable or impossible without the Internet. His research involves studying and building info-tools. He studies and makes use of the adjudicative or 'recommender' cultures of the Web that help to determine the reputation of information as well as organizations. The most well-known tool Rogers has developed with his colleagues is the Issue Crawler, a server-side Web crawler, co-link machine and graph visualizer.
Paolo Ciuccarelli,Northeastern University, College of Art Media and Design, Center for Design Founding Director
Rooted in the sciences of complexity, Paolo’s research and publishing activities focus on the development of data, information and knowledge experiences, tools and methods to support decision making and cognitive processes across multiple domains, from business and management to research and scholarship in the humanities. Formerly Scientific Director of DensityDesign - a research lab he founded at Politecnico di Milano – Design Department - he is now Director of the Northeastern University Center for Design, a hub aimed at fostering interdisciplinary design research.Editorial Assistant
| Natalia Orrego, School of Anthropology, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, CL. Natalia is an anthropologist based at the School of Anthropology of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Her current research interests include critical infrastructure studies, techno ethics and digital methods; and critical data studies. Her doctoral research is an ethnography of 5G, the fifth generation of mobile systems, from a perspective that remarks on the past, present and futures of the information infrastructure. She is a founding member of the Latin American Network on Digital Anthropology. |
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Assistant Editors
Anastassija Kostan, University of Paderborn, DE |
Anastassija Kostan is a philosopher and sociologist. Her research interests include the epistemic accountability for and social implications of AI as well as the digital divide in security and privacy. She is currently working on peoples’ everyday digital security and privacy practices in relation to socioeconomic status. Her doctoral research deals with the reconfiguration of key feminist concepts such as ‘the body’, ‘biology’, and ‘language’ by the new feminist materialisms. |
Sanjana Krishnan, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, US
| Sanjana Krishnan is an urban and digital geographer and a computational social scientist. Her current research looks at how the design and use of digital technologies produces a new approach to governance of land and housing in Mumbai. More broadly, she is interested in studying the political economy and material impacts of data, technology, and algorithms on the margins and investigating how they work in cities of the Global South. She is also part of the open-data community and is motivated to harness data and computational techniques for public interest, as well as conduct trainings on the same. Previously, sanjana worked as a development sector and data consultant for several multilateral aid agencies. |  |
Jianfeng Lan, PhD Candidate, School of Media and Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, CN.
| Jianfeng (Jeff) Lan is a research scholar specializing in human-machine communication, with a focus on the socio-psychological impact on various social relationships such as intimacy, trust, and collaboration. His previous research encompassed topics like virtual uploaders (VUP), gender stereotypes in machine interactions, and the dynamics of human-machine love affairs. Additionally, he explores the psychological effects of social media usage, particularly on users' body image concerns. |  |
Kathryne Metcalf, Department of Communication and Science Studies Program, University of California San Diego.
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Kathryne Metcalf is a humanistic social scientist interested in the diverse forms of practice which maintain and stem from biomedical data and databases. Her dissertation examines biobanks as the epistemic infrastructure of contemporary big data genomics, tracing how their efforts shape and constrain the disease entities that their data are used to (re)produce. Kathryne is also the co-organizer of a multicampus Critical Data Studies working group at the University of California. |
Saide Mobayed, PhD Candidate | Department of Sociology | University of Cambridge.
| Saide Mobayed Vega is a researcher interested in the intersections between human rights, violence against women, digital technologies, and data. She is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Cambridge where she traces how feminicide is recounted by zooming in on global practices of data collection and local data activism with a focus on Mexico. At Cambridge, Saide is also a researcher and impact evaluator for The Whistle, a project that develops digital tools to connect witnesses of human rights violations to advocacy organisations. |  |
Kaelynn Narita PhD Candidate, Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
| Kaelynn Narita is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in the intersection between borders and technology. Her current research explores how digital tools are influencing UK migration governance. Her doctoral thesis unearths the so-called Digital Hostile Environment and the technological implication of the UK's migration governance to disperse border control to public institutions and citizens. Her investigation of the tools utilises a Data Feminist methodology to challenge the process, practices and standards that transform border power. Her work emphasises the impact of private actors and the embedded bias of technology. She is intellectually and personally passionate about challenging the effects of datafied systems in maintaining unjust structures. |  |
El No, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge
Kellen Sharp, University of Texas at Austin, Computational Media Lab.
Kellen Sharp is a researcher in the Computational Media Lab at the University of Texas at Austin and is slated to begin his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, College Park, in the fall. A highly motivated and self-disciplined researcher, his interests include toxic technocultures, such as the manosphere, as well as digital discourses surrounding AI, race, gender, sexuality, and health. |
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Jun Zhang, Information School, University of Sheffield, UK.
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Editor-in-Chief Emeritus and Founding Editor
Evelyn Ruppert
Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Evelyn is Professor Emerita. She studies how digital technologies such as smart phones, social media platforms, as well as myriad government databases generate enormous volumes of data about the movements, preferences, associations, and activities of people. While providing new sources of knowledge about individuals and populations, she investigates how digital technologies and the data they generate can also powerfully shape and have consequences for who we are and how we are known and governed. As such, digital technologies are also changing how we understand ourselves as political subjects, that is, citizens with rights to speech, access, and privacy. How citizens make claims to digital rights through what they say and what they do through digital technologies are key questions that she addresses. Evelyn was Principal Investigator of a five-year European Research Council funded project, Peopling Europe: How data make a people (ARITHMUS; 2014-19). Recent books are all Open Access: Data
Practices: Making up a European People (co-edited with Stephan Scheel); Being Digital Citizens (2015; 2020; co-authored with Engin Isin); Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights (2019; co-edited with Didier Bigo and Engin Isin; and Modes of Knowing (2016; co-edited with John Law).
Co-Editor Emeriti
Adrian Mackenzie, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK
Adrian is interested in the lives of data, especially in databases but also in data analysis, machine learning and other forms of 'analytics.' At the moment, he is focusing on data as a way of thinking about 'BioIT convergences' across biological engineering, DNA synthesis and sequencing, clinical and research databases and visualization technologies. He is looking at changes in the work, productivity and situation of life scientists, and on the transformations in technique, knowledge and products associated with bio-IT related developments. The wider stakes here include the nature of promise, design, value, speculation, subjectivity and imagination in knowledge economies.
Irina Shklovski, Digital Media Communication Research Group, IT University of Copenhagen, DK
Irina is social scientist whose work is located at the intersection of Information Sciences, Communication Studies and Human Computer Interaction. Her studies of social network structures and in-situ relational practices expose how local context can shape technology adoption and use, and how global networked information flows can, in turn, become part of the local context. She examines how people adapt and integrate an increasingly broad array of information and communication technologies into their daily lives and under conditions of strain. Her recent collaborations with data scientists in industry and academia explore how we can enrich our quantitative structural analysis of large social network datasets through the addition of qualitative methods.
Adrian is interested in the lives of data, especially in databases but also in data analysis, machine learning and other forms of 'analytics.' At the moment, he is focusing on data as a way of thinking about 'BioIT convergences' across biological engineering, DNA synthesis and sequencing, clinical and research databases and visualization technologies. He is looking at changes in the work, productivity and situation of life scientists, and on the transformations in technique, knowledge and products associated with bio-IT related developments. The wider stakes here include the nature of promise, design, value, speculation, subjectivity and imagination in knowledge economies.Irina Shklovski, Digital Media Communication Research Group, IT University of Copenhagen, DK
Irina is social scientist whose work is located at the intersection of Information Sciences, Communication Studies and Human Computer Interaction. Her studies of social network structures and in-situ relational practices expose how local context can shape technology adoption and use, and how global networked information flows can, in turn, become part of the local context. She examines how people adapt and integrate an increasingly broad array of information and communication technologies into their daily lives and under conditions of strain. Her recent collaborations with data scientists in industry and academia explore how we can enrich our quantitative structural analysis of large social network datasets through the addition of qualitative methods.
Judith Simon, Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, DE
Judith investigates epistemological and ethical issues arising in the design, development and use of technologies of information, computation and communication. Her approach is inspired by social epistemology, STS, values in design, computer ethics as well as feminist theory. Beyond being interested in the relationship between data epistemologies, data ontologies and data politics, she is working on (epistemic) trust, reputation, and epistemic responsibilities of different human and non-human agents in entangled socio-technical systems.
Anatoliy Gruzd, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, CA
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Anatoliy is an Associate Professor in the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University. He is also the Director of the Social Media Lab. Dr. Gruzd’s research initiatives explore how the advent of social media and the growing availability of social big data are changing the ways in which people communicate, collaborate and disseminate information and how these changes impact the social, economic and political norms and structures of modern society.
Agnieszka Leszczynski, Department of Geography, Western University, CanadaAgnieszka is a critical geographer and trained spatial data scientist whose scholarship integrates social and economic geographies, geographic information science, and science and technology studies. Her research engages the social, economic, and technological shifts associated with the commercialization of digital location (map-based apps, location-based services, sensors, and geocoded content), with current work looking at the value of location in the platform/sharing economy.
Hannah Yee-Fen LIM, Division of Business Law, Nanyang Business
School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Hannah is an internationally recognised legal expert on all areas of technology law, including data privacy, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Fintech, health technology, ethics and intellectual property. She has been appointed as a legal expert and has been advising international bodies such as the World Health Organization and the United Nations (UNCITRAL). She is currently one of 15 international legal experts appointed by UNIDROIT to research on and draft new International Model Laws to govern Cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other digital assets. She is the author of hundreds of papers and 6 scholarly books on law and technology published by internationally established publishers such as Oxford University Press. She graduated with double degrees in Computer Science and in Law from the University of Sydney, Australia where she went on to complete a Master of Laws by Research with Honours under a Telstra Scholarship. Hannah’s research has been cited with approval by senior judiciary, most notably by the High Court of Australia.
School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
