Dr Lina Dencik is Professor at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture. Her research interests broadly concern developments in media and technology and social and political change. She has published extensively in the areas of globalisation theory, activism and digital media. Currently, she is doing work in the areas of datafication and implications for understandings of social justice, looking particularly at the governance and experiences of resource-poor and targeted communities. Lina is Co-Director of the Data Justice Lab.
Dr Arne Hintz is Reader at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture. His research focuses on the practices and conditions of digital citizenship, combining work on citizen media and participation, digital policy, internet governance, surveillance and datafication. He is Co-Chair of the Global Media Policy Working Group of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and directs Cardiff University’s MA Digital Media and Society. He is Co-Director of the Data Justice Lab.
Dr Joanna Redden is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western University. Her research focuses on the datafication of governance. She investigates how government information systems and service provision are changing, the democratic implications of changing government practices and how these transformations are affecting people. Previous work has investigated the relationships between digital media and poverty politics. Joanna is co-editor of Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data (2015) and author of The Mediation of Poverty: The News, New Media and Politics (2014). She is Co-Director of the Data Justice Lab.
Dr Emiliano Trere is Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture, and Research Fellow within the COSMOS Center for Social Movement Studies of the Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy). He has published extensively on the challenges, opportunities and myths of media technologies for social movements and political parties in Europe and Latin America. He is the cofounder of the “Big Data from the South” Research Network that aims to interrogate the diverse techno-cultural practices that subvert the dominant narratives of datafication as theorized and narrated by the global north.
Naomi Owen is a PhD student in the School of Journalism, Media, and Culture at Cardiff University. Her studies are supported by a DTP grant from the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC). Her PhD project focuses on data-related reporting during COVID-19, providing new insights into the ways in which the growing uses of data systems across public life can be made accountable. Her research explores the shifting nature of data journalism throughout the pandemic and the growing attention to the implications of data-driven processes for democracy. Prior, Naomi worked as a journalist, writing about the global privacy and security landscape.
Fieke Jansen is a PhD candidate at the Data Justice Lab, as part of the ERC funded DATAJUSTICE project. She looks at the effects of data on society. Her research focuses on the impact of implementing data driven decision making in European police forces. Prior Fieke worked at Tactical Tech and Hivos on data, privacy and digital security programs and lead a knowledge program on the intersection of youth, technology and activism.
Philippa Metcalfe is a PhD candidate at the Data Justice Lab, as part of the ERC funded DATAJUSTICE project. She investigates how the datafication of society is affecting migrant and refugee communities in Europe, focusing on border policing, asylum process and access to welfare. Philippa has previously carried out research on migration, humanitarianism and European asylum policy, conducting fieldwork in Greece with migrant solidarity groups. She has completed a BA in Social Anthropology at University of Sussex (2013), and MSc in Social and Public Policy at Cardiff University (2017).
Isobel Rorison is a PhD student in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. She is researching the impacts of sharing National Health Service patient data, internally across government and externally with private organisations, and the critical role of journalists in reporting these activities. This work is funded by the Economic & Social Research Council. Isobel previously worked for the NHS supporting managed clinical networks across the South West, and most recently with the Specialised Clinical Commissioning national team.
Jess Brand is is a research assistant at the Data Justice Lab currently working on the project ‘Towards Democratic Auditing’ with a particular focus on the role of civil society. Previously she worked on the Lab’s Data Policies project, exploring the possibilities and limits of platform regulation against a backdrop of mounting concern over platform capitalism and monopoly power. Before joining the Lab she was an intern at Privacy International, researching regulatory solutions to the privacy and security challenges of the Internet of Things. She is a former student of Cardiff University’s MA Digital Media and Society.
Sananda Sahoo is a research assistant working on a research project titled ‘Mapping Canadian Government Uses of AI for Social Services’ (funded by FIMS, Western University). She is PhD candidate in Media Studies at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western University, Canada. She looks at the intersections of public, public space and digital infrastructures. Her previous research includes political posters and platforms, questions of collective responsibility, sites of violence in the digital sphere, and colonial narratives in photographs and memoirs by women. She holds an MPhil in English Literature and master’s degrees in journalism and English Literature.
Jędrzej Niklas is a postdoctoral researcher at the Data Justice Lab, as part of the ERC-funded DATAJUSTICE project. His research focuses on the intersection between human rights, data-driven technologies, and the theory of the state. Recently, he has also started exploring implications of digital innovations for environmental governance. Jedrzej has a PhD in international law from the University of Warsaw. Priori he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leeds and London School of Economics and Political Science where he analysed the problems of algorithmic discrimination. He also worked as a legal specialist at the Panoptykon Foundation in Poland addressing policies related to data protection, automated decision-making and surveillance of vulnerable groups.
Cate Hopkins is a PhD candidate at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture, where her studies are supported by a grant from the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC). Her PhD project is concerned with the ways in which discourses of surveillance impact on trade union campaigns and organisation. Her research interests broadly include citizen participation in democracy, social justice activism, and digital media. Cate has been active in the trade union movement for over ten years.
Ina Sander is a PhD candidate at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture. Her studies are supported by a DTP grant from the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) in collaboration with the London based NGO Privacy International. In her PhD project, she researches ways to foster an understanding and critical reflection of data structures and conceptualises such critical big data literacy. Ina has recently completed a research fellowship at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, Germany.
Affiliates
Dr Karin Wahl-Jorgensen is Professor in the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, and also serves as Director of Research Environment and Development in the school. Her research focuses on journalism and citizenship, including questions of datafication and surveillance. She has authored or edited nine books, including Emotions, Media and Politics (Polity, 2018), Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society (Polity, 2018, with Arne Hintz and Lina Dencik), Disasters and the Media (Peter Lang, 2012, with Mervi Pantti and Simon Cottle), and Handbook of Journalism Studies (Routledge, 2009, co-edited with Thomas Hanitzsch).
Dr Francesca Sobande is a Lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture. Her research explores how issues related to racism, sexism and intersecting structural inequalities manifest in media and the marketplace. Francesca’s work particularly focuses on digital remix culture and the media experiences of Black women. She is Communication Co-Chair of the Race in the Marketplace (RIM) Network and directs Cardiff University’s BA Media, Journalism and Culture. Francesca is co-editor of To Exist is To Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (2019) and is author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (2020).
Dr Javier Sánchez Monedero is a Computer Science research fellow at the University of Córdoba and earlier he joined as post-doc to the Data Justice Lab, as part of the ERC funded DATAJUSTICE project. His background is in distributed systems and machine learning methods. He has experience in applied computational intelligence to several domains (biomedicine and climate analysis among other topics). He contributes to the lab by filling the knowledge gap between social and media researchers and technology as well as with technological auditing and design proposals.
Fellows
Silvia Mollicchi is a researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute. Prior to joining the Institute she completed her PhD at the University of Warwick and studied at the Centre for Culture Studies, Goldsmiths College. She has worked as a culture writer and in various art and culture institutions in public engagement. Silvia is working on developing a typology of public administration algorithmic decision-making systems, building on work already commissioned at the Ada Lovelace Institute, and researching what the ideal conditions for the institution of a public register (or another form of registering mechanism) in the UK might be. The project offers structural and historical insight into the use of algorithmic systems that now feed into various functions of the state.
Ira Anjali Anwar will be a Data Justice Lab research fellow in February/March 2021. She is working at the intersection of technology and social justice in the South Asian context, examining the ways in which data driven technologies mediate the access and experience of democratic rights for different social groups, with a particular focus on conflict areas and labor rights. Her research engages with the power negotiations between nation states and transnational tech corporations and how this impacts data rights in the context of developing nations. Ira has worked with Tandem Research and IT for Change (ITfC) and was previously a research assistant for the leading labor and human rights activist Aruna Roy. She has also worked with Bot Populi, an alternative media platform highlighting issues of digital justice from a global south perspective.
Carolina Onate Burgos is a lawyer who works internationally as a consultant in competition and consumer law, data protection and new technology policies. She finished her LLM at the University of Cambridge last year, and previously has worked in a private practice, a Tribunal and as a regulatory advisor in Chile and the UK. Carolina will be a Data Justice Lab research fellow in winter/spring 2021 and will research cases of discrimination and algorithmic bias. Particularly, she will explore how citizens can discover if they have been a victim of data harm in commercial transactions in Latin America and learn about the legal avenues that they can take to obtain justice.
Tamika Blu will be a Data Justice Lab research fellow in spring/summer. Blue is a Community-Participatory Researcher with the Our Data Bodies Collective, exploring the way frontline communicatees digital information is collected, stored, and shared by government and corporations, as well as the impacts of data systems on re-entry, fair housing, public assistance, and community development. Blu’s work particularly focuses on intersections between digital data collection and human rights, working with local communities, community organizations, and social support networks to amplify the experiences and stories of the communities most impacted, while developing popular education tools to help inform, activate, engage, and inspire communities to lead the charge against digital profiling. Blu is the co-author of the Digital Defense Playbook(2018).