Scholars Council

Ergin Bulut received his PhD from the Institute of Communications Research at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Currently, he works as an Associate Professor at Koç University's Media and Visual Arts Department, where he teaches classes on media industries, video game studies, media sociology, and media and populism. He researches in the area of political economy of media and cultural production, video game studies, media and politics, and critical theory. He is author of the book, A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry (Cornell). His work has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Triple C, International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Television and New Media, Communication and Critical-Cultural Studies. In 2019-2020 academic year, Bulut was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and faculty fellow at Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at UPenn.

Jenna Burrell is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. She is the co-director of the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group. Her first book Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana (The MIT Press) came out in May 2012. She is currently pursuing questions of control, autonomy, domination, and oppression on algorithmic platforms. She has a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on how marginalized communities adapt digital technologies to meet their needs and to pursue their goals and ideals.

Antonio A. Casilli is full professor of sociology at Telecom Paris, the school of telecommunications engineering of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris. Since 2007 he has been facilitating the seminar "Studying digital cultures" at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences) of Paris.

He is one of the founders of INDL (International Network on Digital Labor). Among his books, translated into several languages: "En attentant les robots", Editions du Seuil, 2019); "Trabajo, conocimiento y vigilancia" (Editorial del Estado, 2018); "Against the hypothesis of the end of privacy" (with P. Tubaro and Y. Sarabi, Springer, 2014); "Les Liaisons numériques" (Editions du Seuil, 2010).

He was the editorial adviser for "Invisibles - Les travailleurs du clic" (France Televisions, 2020), a documentary series for the French public national television broadcaster based on his research on digital labor. His work is regularly featured in international media (Le Monde, BBC, Repubblica, CNN, La Vanguardia, Hankyoreh Shinmun, Kathimerini, RTS, Época).

I am an assistant professor in the Statistics & Data Science department at Yale University. I study the manifestation of social and economic biases in our online lives via the algorithms that encode and perpetuate them. My research leverages both experimental and theoretical approaches, and my work spans multiple disciplines including data science, machine learning, fairness in socio-technical systems and algorithm design.

At Yale I co-founded the Computation and Society Initiative.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, and leads the Digital Democracies Group which was launched in 2019. The Group aims to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation by fostering critical and creative user practices and alternative paradigms for connection. It has four distinct research streams all led by Dr. Chun: Beyond Verification which looks at authenticity and the spread of disinformation; From Hate to Agonism, focusing on fostering democratic exchange online; Desegregating Network Neighbourhoods, combatting homophily across platforms; and Discriminating Data: Neighbourhoods, Individuals and Proxies, investigating the centrality of race, gender, class and sexuality to big data and network analytics.

Danielle Citron is a professor of law at the Boston University School of Law, where she teaches and writes about information privacy, free expression, and civil rights. Professor Citron has garnered awards nationally and internationally. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2019 based on her work on cyber stalking and sexual privacy. In 2015, the United Kingdom’s Prospect magazine named Professor Citron one of the “Top 50 World Thinkers.” The Maryland Daily Record named her one of the “Top 50 Most Influential Marylanders” of 2015. Professor Citron’s book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Harvard University Press, 2014) was named one of the “20 Best Moments for Women in 2014” by Cosmopolitan magazine.

Gabriella (Biella) Coleman holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. Trained as an anthropologist, her scholarship covers the politics, cultures, and ethics of hacking. Her first book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking was published in 2013 with Princeton University Press. She then published Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014), which was named to Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2014 and was awarded the Diana Forsythe Prize by the American Anthropological Association. Committed to public ethnography, she routinely speaks to diverse audiences and has recently focused her time to editing Hack_Curio, an online video exhibit covering the cultures of hacking and issues around inclusion, propaganda, security/insecurity, democracy and media representation connected to digital media and hacking. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including from the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Foundation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.

Cori Crider is a lawyer and founding Director of Foxglove, a non-profit founded in 2019. Foxglove exists to make tech fair—and to sue when it isn’t. In its first year of operation, Foxglove brought the first successful challenge to a government algorithm in the UK, the first case about tech companies' push into national health systems during the pandemic, and helped bring the first European cases on behalf of Facebook content moderators with PTSD. Cori lives and works in London.

Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies: Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University

Abigail De Kosnik is the Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media,(link is external) an Associate Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and an affiliated faculty member of Gender & Women’s Studies. She researches popular media, particularly digital media, film and television, and fan studies. She is particularly interested in how issues of feminism, queerness, ethnicity, and transnationalism intersect with new media studies and performance studies.

De Kosnik’s book Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom,(link is external) was published by MIT Press in 2016. She is the co-editor (with Keith Feldman) of the essay collection “#identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation”(link is external) (University of Michigan Press, 2019), and the co-editor, with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington, of the edited essay collection “The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era” (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). She has published articles on media fandom, popular digital culture, and performance studies in JCMS (Journal of Cinema and Media Studies), The International Journal of Communication, Modern Drama, Transformative Works and Cultures, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Performance Research, and elsewhere. Her courses include History and Theory of New Media (a core required seminar for the Designated Emphasis in New Media), Performance, Television, and Social Media.

De Kosnik is currently writing a book on artists, politicians, journalists, and “regular” media users who self-identify as media pirates, with the working title Performing Piracy. She is one of the faculty co-organizers of The Color of New Media, a working group that focuses on the overlap of critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and transnational studies with new media studies (sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender with additional support from BCNM). De Kosnik is Filipina American.
I received my PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My dissertation was the Machine-learning Protest Event Data System (MPEDS), a system which uses machine learning and natural language processing to create protest event data.

My current research agenda is two-fold. One line of research centers on origins of the training data which form the informational infrastructure of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic fairness frameworks. Another line of research (with Ellen Berrey) seeks to understand the interplay between student protest and university responses in US and Canada. My past work has focused on how new and social media has changed social movement mobilization and political participation.

I am as much as an educator as I am a researcher. I have taught workshops and courses on computational methods for social scientists, social movements, and the implications of information as infrastructure. I co-founded the [now defunct] computational social science blog Bad Hessian.

As a second job, I play women's flat track roller derby with Bay Area Derby.

Stephanie Dick is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her research and teaching are informed by her background in STS and History of Science, with a focus on computing, mathematics, and artificial intelligence since the Second World War. She is the co-editor, with Janet Abbate, of Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society which is forthcoming with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2022. Her first book project, Making Up Minds: Computing and Proof in the Postwar United States explores attempts to reproduce human intelligence, mathematical intelligence in particular, in computers and the theories of human cognitive faculties that informed these efforts. It is a book about the men who looked at early digital computers and saw themselves, and the many histories that informed that perplexing and problematic recognition. Her second book project explores the establishment of the first centralized law enforcement databanks in the 1960s, the political and technological construction of “criminality” within them, and their role in mass incarceration and ongoing racial injustice in policing. Stephanie is a co-organizer on the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power” at the University of Cambridge, she co-edits the “Mining the Past” column at the Harvard Data Science Review; she is a co-organizer of the annual SIGCIS conference; she serves on the editorial board for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing; she is a member of the Scholarly Council at the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA; she is an elected Council Member for the History of Science Society, and co-chair of the Committee on Membership. Stephanie is a teacher, and Teaching Advisory Board member with the Freedom Summer Collegiate Program in Mississippi. Before joining the faculty at SFU, Stephanie was an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Dr. Chris Gilliard is a writer, professor and speaker. His scholarship concentrates on digital privacy, and the intersections of race, class, and technology. He is an advocate for critical and equity-focused approaches to tech in education. His work has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, EDUCAUSE Review, Fast Company, Vice, and Real Life Magazine.

Rafael Grohmann is an Assistant Professor in Communication at the Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos University), Brazil. He is Coordinator of DigiLabour Research Lab. Principal Investigator for the Fairwork project in Brazil. Founding Member of Board of Directors for Labor Tech Research Network. Researcher of Histories of Artificial Intelligence, University of Cambridge, through an International Research and Collaboration Award. His research interests include platform cooperativism and worker-owned platforms, work & AI, datafication, workers' organization, platform labor, communication and work. He holds a PhD in Communication from the University of São Paulo.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History. She is also the Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). City of Inmates recently won the 2018 James Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, 2018 Athearn Prize from the Western Historical Association, the 2018 John Hope Franklin Book Prize from the American Studies Association, and the 2018 American Book Award. Currently, Professor Lytle Hernandez is the Director and Principal Investigator for Million Dollar Hoods, a university-based, community-drive research project that maps the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. The Million Dollar Hoods team won a 2018 Freedom Now! Award from the Los Angeles Community Action Network. For her leadership on the Million Dollar Hoods team, Professor Lytle Hernandez was awarded the 2018 Local Hero Award from KCET/PBS and the 2019 Catalyst Award from the South L.A. parent/student advocacy organization, CADRE. In 2019, Professor Lytle Hernandez was named a James D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow for her historical and contemporary work.

Mar Hicks is an author, historian, and professor doing research on the history of computing, labor, technology, and queer science and technology studies. Their research focuses on how gender and sexuality bring hidden technological dynamics to light, and how the experiences of women and LGBTQIA people change the core narratives of the history of computing in unexpected ways. Hicks’s multiple award-winning book, Programmed Inequality, looks at how the British lost their early lead in computing by discarding women computer workers, and what this cautionary tale tells us about current issues in high tech. Read more at: marhicks.com.

Dr. Hogan is the Director of the Environmental Media Lab (EML) and Associate Professor (Communication, Media and Film) at the University of Calgary. Hogan’s research has focused on data centers/server farms/the cloud, and, more recently, on DNA data storage – each understood from within the contexts of planetary catastrophe and collective anxieties about the future. Dr. Hogan’s work has been published in journals like Ephemera, First Monday, Television and New Media, Big Data and Society, Culture Machine, and the Canadian Journal of Communication among others. Career highlight so far includes keynoting the McLuhan lecture at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin.

Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019). Chasing Innovation has been awarded the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. Her research examines the cultural politics of high-tech work and the counter-practices they generate, as both an ethnographer, a designer, and a former technology worker. She is a co-founder and maintainer of digital labor activism tool Turkopticon. Her work has appeared at ACM SIGCHI, New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values, South Atlantic Quarterly, and other venues. She sits on the Editorial Committee of Public Culture and on the Editorial Advisory Boards of New Technology, Work, and Employment and Design and Culture. She has a Ph.D. in Informatics from University of California, Irvine.

Sarah J. Jackson is a Presidential Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania where she studies how media, journalism, and technology are used by and represent marginalized publics. Her first book, Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press (Routledge 2014), examines the relationship between Black celebrity activism, journalism, and American politics. Her co-authored second book, Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press 2020), focuses on the use of Twitter in contemporary social movements. As a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, she is working on a third book on the political power and industry innovation of African American media-makers. She engages deeply with critical theories of the public sphere, race, and social movements throughout her work.

Jackson is co-director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center (MIC) which explores the intersections between media, democracy, technology, policy, and social justice. MIC produces engaged research and analysis while collaborating with community leaders to help support activist initiatives and policy interventions.

Jackson serves an associate editor at Communication Theory, as the Conversation & Commentary editor at Women’s Studies in Communication, and on the editorial board of Political Communication. She sits on the advisory boards of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and the Social Science Research Council’s MediaWell initiative. Previously, she was a Fall 2018 fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and a 2019 New America National Fellow.

Gaye Theresa Johnson writes and teaches on race and racism, cultural history, spatial politics, and political economy. Her first book, Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2013) is a history of civil rights and spatial struggles among Black and Brown freedom seekers and cultural workers in LA. Johnson’s second book is titled The Futures of Black Radicalism, and is co-edited with Alex Lubin (Verso Press, 2017); she is currently working on a third book titled Let’s Get Free: Social Protest at the Intersection of Mass Incarceration and Immigrant Detention (UNC Press). In it, she demonstrates how visual and aural protest art constitute one of the most significant discourses of resistance to twentieth and 21st century anti-immigrant and pro-carceral policy and practices, revealing how expressive cultures enact an alternative narrative history about migration, race, and power.

Johnson has also contributed journal articles and book chapters to historical, cultural studies, and ethnic studies volumes. She has been a visiting researcher at Stanford University’s Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, as well as at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has been active with the Los Angeles Community Action Network and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. She is the Board President of the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) and an advisory board member for both the Goldin Institute and the Rosenberg Fund for Children. Johnson received a B.A. in Sociology and Ethnic Studies from the University of California at San Diego, and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota.

More information about her first book, Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity, can be found at: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520275287

David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression (2014-2020). His 2019 book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports), explores the ways in which companies, governments and activists struggle to define the rules for online expression.

Appointed by the UN Human Rights Council in June 2014, David served through July 2020 as the global body’s principal monitor for freedom of expression issues worldwide. He reported to the UN on COVID-19 and freedom of expression and, in 2019, to the UN General Assembly on online hate speech. His earlier reporting addressed, among other topics, the ways in which Artificial Intelligence technologies implicate human rights issues, the global private surveillance industry and its impact on freedom of expression, growing repression of freedom of expression globally, encryption and anonymity as promoters of freedom of expression, the protection of whistleblowers and journalistic sources, the roles and responsibilities of private Internet companies, and the regulation of online content by social media and search companies.

Professor Leazer is an Associate Professor and recently served for six years as the chair of the UCLA Department of Information Studies. He conducts research on the organization of information and knowledge, information retrieval, and how people seek and use information. He is also interested in the role of libraries in public education, and addressing the public school library crisis in California. He is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering from the National Science Foundation and awarded by President Bill Clinton.

In his role as Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development, Charlton McIlwain advances NYU’s academic excellence by supporting faculty recruitment, retention, and career advancement. McIlwain leads NYU’s Center for Faculty Advancement, which provides programming, resources, and special recognitions and awards that promote faculty research, teaching, mentorship, community engagement, and academic leadership development for NYU faculty, as well as those faculty with whom we collaborate through our Faculty Resource Network. McIlwain oversees the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, which brings together NYU’s faculty experts to collaborate with each other and with partners in the public and private sectors on the ethical creation, use, and governance of technology in society, and is NYU’s Designee to the New America/Ford Foundation sponsored Public Interest Technology-University Network. In addition to these specific duties, McIlwain works closely with the Vice Provost’s team and the offices of Research, Work Life, Teaching & Learning with Technology, Academic Appointments, Program & Project Management Services, Human Resources, Equal Opportunity, Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation, NYU Libraries, and others to ensure that our faculty have access to all available resources at NYU to advance their professional goals.

Dr. McIlwain has been at NYU since 2001. As Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, his scholarly work focuses on the intersections of race, digital media, and racial justice activism. He is the founder of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and the author of the new book, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, by Oxford University Press. He also co-authored the award-winning book, Race Appeal: How Political Candidates Invoke Race In U.S. Political Campaigns. He received his Ph.D. in Communication and a Master’s of Human Relations, both from the University of Oklahoma, and a B.A. in Family Psychology from Oklahoma Baptist University.

Jasmine is an Associate Professor of Telecommunication at the University of Florida, where she teaches courses on regulation. She researches media, technology, and law with an emphasis on privacy, surveillance and data governance. She is also the Associate Director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at UF, and a Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.”

I am an Assistant Professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies and Director of California Rare Book School. I also direct the Library, Ethics, and Justice Lab at UCLA.
Between 2017-2020 I was Assistant Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program in the Department of Information and Library Science (ILS) in the School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, at Indiana University Bloomington, with a faculty affiliation in the Integrated Program in the Environment.
My research trajectory has generally focused on information representation and positionality; critical, ethical, and justice-oriented LIS work; public libraries; and international library development. At the core of all of my activities is a deep attention to the cultural, political, ethical, and power-based structures at the root of all ILS matters. My pedagogy focuses on preparing a library and information workforce attuned to critical community and social issues, and that can engage in relevant and personally meaningful work within the profession.
My current monograph, Power of Position: Biodiversity and Knowledge Organization in the Life Sciences, is set to be released by the The MIT Press in Spring 2022 as part of its History and Foundations of Information Science Series. The monograph explores what ILS can learn about classifications and taxonomies from studying the history, construction, and articulation of biodiversity knowledge organization systems. I follow how the notion of a species is constructed through representational processes. A conceptual framework is posited that illustrates how cultural, ethical, and epistemological power is enacted through instantiative, instrumental, and operative classification frameworks.
In my current research trajectory, I broaden my examination of power and representation to understand how the space, political position, and civic engagement of public libraries (within U.S. and international communities) can enact social justice and broaden individual and cultural agency. This work stems from my Library, Ethics, & Justice Lab (Justice-Lab) at UCLA, which has been funded by numerous organizations and agencies. An emphasis of my work is international and comparative librarianship motivated by a Fulbright Program award. I am working with the U.S. Embassy in Kosovo and the National Library of Kosovo to create a national ILS B.A. program through the University of Pristina. The curriculum spans all public and academic library matters, from ethics and intellectual freedom, user and instructional services, children’s and young adult services, KO, and library management. I’m also working to better the working conditions of ILS workers by providing professional library training to staff throughout the country, in both urban and rural areas.
Other fields of scholarly interest include, history of the book and print culture, special collections & archives, and library administration and management.
I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Information Studies at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). I graduated with a B.A. in American Literature and Culture, with a minor in Anthropology, from UCLA. I also received my M.F.A In Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and a M.L.I.S. with a specialization in Rare Books, Print and Visual Culture from UCLA.

Professor Gina Neff is a Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. She studies the future of work in data-rich environments. Professor Neff leads a new multinational comparative research project on the effects of the adoption of AI across multiple industries. She is the author of Venture Labor (MIT Press, 2012), which won the 2013 American Sociological Association Communication and Information Technologies Best Book Award; and with Dawn Nafus Self-Tracking (MIT Press, 2016). Her writing for the general public has appeared in Wired, Slate and The Atlantic, among other outlets. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University, where she remains a faculty affiliate at the Center on Organizational Innovation, and she serves as a strategic advisor on the social impact of AI for the Women’s Forum.

Stephanie Nguyen is a human-computer interaction designer and researcher, specializing in data privacy, user experience design, and tech policies that impact marginalized populations. She is currently working on research at Consumer Reports and is an appointed member of IEEE Standards Association’s Global Advisory Council on Children's Experiences. She was most recently a Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab and a design lead for projects at the U.S. Digital Service under the Obama Administration.

Jenni Olson is an independent writer and non-fiction filmmaker based in Berkeley, California. Her two feature-length essay films — The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) — premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and, like her many short films, have screened internationally to awards and acclaim. Her work as an experimental filmmaker and her expansive personal collection of LGBTQ film prints and memorabilia were acquired in April 2020 by the Harvard Film Archive (more info here about: Harvard's Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection), and her reflection on the last 30 years of LGBT film history, in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2021.

Jenni is currently co-director of The Bressan Project, devoted to restoring and re-releasing the films of pioneering gay filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. Jenni’s work as a film historian includes the Lambda Award nominated The Queer Movie Poster Book (Chronicle Books, 2005) and her many vintage movie trailer presentations (Homo Promo, Afro Promo, etc.). Her film criticism has appeared in numerous publications including Filmmaker Magazine, The Advocate and the San Francisco Bay Guardian and she is currently a film columnist for Logo TV’s NewNowNext.

Jenni is a former co-director of the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival, the oldest and largest queer film festival on the planet, and served as director of marketing at LGBT film distributor Wolfe Video for more than a decade where she also created the global LGBT streaming VOD platform WolfeOnDemand.com. She co-founded the pioneering LGBT online platform, PlanetOut.com as well as the legendary Queer Brunch at Sundance. She is also the proud proprietor of Butch.org.

Jenni has been widely honored for her creative writing and innovative non-fiction storytelling. She holds a BA in Film Studies from the University of Minnesota and is currently an independent consultant in marketing and digital film distribution. A 2018 MacDowell Fellow, Jenni is now in development on her third feature-length essay film, The Quiet World and an essayistic memoir of the same name.

Frank Pasquale is Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Information Society Project, and Chair of the Subcommittee on Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security of the U.S. National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics. He is an expert on the law of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning. He is a prolific and internationally recognized scholar. His book, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press 2015), has been recognized as a landmark study on how “Big Data” affects our lives, and was recently recognized in a symposium in the journal Big Data & Society. The Black Box Society develops a social theory of reputation, search, and finance, while promoting pragmatic reforms to improve the information economy. His forthcoming book, New Laws of Robotics (Harvard University Press 2020), and a volume on AI he co-edited, The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI (Oxford University Press 2020), will both be released this year.

Pasquale has advised business and government leaders in the health care, internet, and finance industries, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. House Judiciary and Energy & Commerce Committees, the Senate Banking Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, and directorates-general of the European Commission. He also has advised officials in Canada and the United Kingdom on law and technology policy. He presently chairs the Subcommittee on Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security, part of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, where he is serving a four-year term.

He is one of the leaders of a global movement for “algorithmic accountability.” In media and communication studies, he has developed a comprehensive legal analysis of barriers to, and opportunities for, regulation of internet platforms. In privacy law and surveillance, his work is among the leading research on regulation of algorithmic ranking, scoring, and sorting systems, including credit scoring and threat scoring.

Shana L. Redmond (she/her) is a public-facing scholar and writer whose work has appeared in critical media and literary publications including NPR, BBC 3, and Brick: A Literary Journal. In 2019 she contributed the liner essay for the vinyl release of the original motion picture soundtrack to Jordan Peele’s film, Us (Waxwork Records). She is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU Press, 2014) and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke UP, 2020). She is Professor of Musicology and African American Studies at UCLA.

Shana L. Redmond (she/her) is a public-facing scholar and writer whose work has appeared in critical media and literary publications including NPR, BBC 3, and Brick: A Literary Journal. In 2019 she contributed the liner essay for the vinyl release of the original motion picture soundtrack to Jordan Peele’s film, Us (Waxwork Records). She is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU Press, 2014) and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke UP, 2020). She is Professor of Musicology and African American Studies at UCLA.

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, which promotes research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and and seeks to build power to make social change. Previously she was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her Master’s in City Planning (1994) and Ph.D. in Urban Planning (1999).

Ananya is the recipient of several awards including the Paul Davidoff book award, which recognizes scholarship that advances social justice, for Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, and the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching recognition that the University of California, Berkeley bestows on its faculty. She was named “California Professor of the Year,” an award of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. In 2011, Ananya received the Excellence in Achievement award of the Cal Alumni Association, a lifetime achievement award which celebrated her contributions to the University of California and public sphere.

Anasuya Sengupta is Co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?. She has led initiatives in India and the USA, across the global South, and internationally for over 20 years, to amplify marginalised voices in virtual and physical worlds. She is the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, former Regional Program Director at the Global Fund for Women, and a 2017 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow. She received a 2018 Internet and Society award from the Oxford Internet Institute. Anasuya holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She also has a BA in Economics (Honours) from Delhi University. When not rabble-rousing online, Anasuya builds and breaks pots and poems, takes long walks by the water and in the forest, and contorts herself into yoga poses.

Dr. SA Smythe (they / them) is a poet, translator, and an assistant professor of Black European literary & cultural studies, contemporary Mediterranean studies, and Black trans poetics at UCLA. Smythe is completing the monograph Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean, a transdisciplinary study of the racialized notions of citizenship and Black belonging across Europe, East Africa, and the Mediterranean. Smythe also has a collection of poetry, titled proclivity, and an edited volume, Troubling the Grounds: Global Configurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity, both forthcoming.

Catherine Knight Steele is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland – College Park and was the Founding Director of the Andrew W. Mellon funded African American Digital Humanities Initiative (AADHum). She earned her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on race, gender, and media with a specific focus on African American culture and discourse in traditional and new media. She examines representations of marginalized communities in the media and how groups resist oppression and utilize online technology to create spaces of community. Dr. Steele’s research on the Black blogosphere, digital discourses of resistance, and digital Black feminism has been published in such journals as Social Media + Society, Information, Communication and Society, and Television and New Media. Dr. Steele argues that online practices of joy, gossip, signifying, and play are integral to understanding Black discursive practices online. Her forthcoming book, Digital Black Feminism examines the relationship between Black feminism and technology as a centuries-long gendered and racial project in the U.S. with implications on the future of both Black feminist rhetoric and as potentially the most generative way to understand the possibilities and constraints of digital technology.

Dr. Tonia Sutherland is assistant professor in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Prior to joining the faculty at UHM, Sutherland was an assistant professor in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama. Sutherland holds a PhD and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Computing and Information (formerly the School of Information Studies), and a BA in history, performance studies, and cultural studies from Hampshire College. Global in scope, Suther­land’s research focuses on entanglements of technology and culture, with particular emphases on critical and liberatory work within the fields of archival studies, digital studies, and science and technology studies (STS).

Miriam E. Sweeney is an Associate Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama. She researches intersections of race and gender in the design and implementation of AI, virtual assistants, voice interfaces, and chatbot technologies. Using critical cultural frameworks, she explores the interconnectedness of ideology, design, and information systems as sites of power and cultural production.

Abel Valenzuela Jr. is Professor of Urban Planning and Chicana/o Studies, Director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Immigration Policy. Professor Valenzuela is one of the leading national experts on day labor and has published numerous articles and technical reports on the subject. His research interests include precarious labor markets, worker centers, immigrant workers, and Los Angeles. His academic base is urban sociology, planning, and labor studies. In addition to the topic of day labor, he has published numerous articles on immigrant settlement, labor market outcomes, urban poverty and inequality, including co-editing (with Lawrence Bobo, Melvin Oliver, and Jim Johnson) Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2000, Immigration and Crime: Race, Ethnicity, and Violence (with Ramiro Martinez Jr.). He has also published in American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Annual Review of Sociology, New England Journal of Public Policy, Working USA: a Journal of Labor and Society, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, and Regional Studies. Dr. Valenzuela earned his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and his M.C.P. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was born and raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Venice Beach with his wife and three sons.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia.

He is the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018). He also wrote Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), and The Googlization of Everything — and Why We Should Worry (University of California Press, 2011). He has written two previous books: Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). He also co-edited (with Carolyn Thomas) the collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

After five years as a professional journalist, he earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Vaidhyanathan has also taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Columbia University, New York University, McMaster University, and the University of Amsterdam. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He was born and raised in Buffalo, New York and resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.