2022 > Organisers

Organisers

Jo Bates

Senior Lecturer, Information School, University of Sheffield

Jo Bates is Senior Lecturer in the Information School at the University of Sheffield. Jo’s research in Critical Data Studies covers four thematic areas: data cultures, data journeys & friction, climate & environmental data, and digital labour. Jo is currently leading the Patterns in Practice project which explores how practitioners’ beliefs, values and feelings interact to shape how they engage with and in data mining and machine learning across science, education and the arts. Other current projects include Living with Data and Net-zero Data Frictions.

Monika Frątczak

Research Assistant, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield

Monika Frątczak completed her PhD this year at the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield. Her research explored emotional responses and (potential) democratic participation through data visualisation about climate change in two different national contexts. She is currently working on the Living with Data project. She has also worked as a research assistant with Ozge Ozduzen mapping and visualising inequalities in vaccine hesitancy and with Chris W Anderson, Giorgia Aiello and Helen Kennedy on ‘Generic Visuals in the News’.

Ysabel Gerrard

Lecturer in Digital Media and Society, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield

Ysabel Gerrard joined the Department of Sociological Studies in September 2017, having completed her PhD at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds and spending some time as an Intern at Microsoft Research New England. In addition to her research and teaching, Ysabel is the Chair of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) Digital Culture and Communication Section (2021-2022), and a member of Facebook’s Suicide and Self-Injury (SSI) Advisory Board. She often talks to the press about her research and has appeared in venues like BBC Woman’s Hour, BBC News, The Guardian, The Independent, NBC News, The Washington Post and WIRED.’

Helen Kennedy

Professor of Digital Society, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield

Helen Kennedy is Professor of Digital Society at the University of Sheffield where she directs the Living With Data programme of research. She is interested in how digital developments are experienced and how these experiences can inform the work of digital practitioners in ways that overcome inequalities. She is interested in perceptions of datafication, the possibility of data-related agency, trust, equity, justice, and what ‘the digital good’ might look like. Other current projects include Generic Visuals in the News and Patterns in Practice: cultures of data mining in science, education and the arts. Recent books include Data Visualization in Society (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and Post, Mine, Repeat: social media data mining becomes ordinary (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). A full list of publications can be found here.

Juliane Jarke

Senior Researcher, Institute for Information Management Bremen (ifib) & Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI), University of Bremen

Starting from the observation that digital technologies are always relational and that through their design, we configure (future) socio-technical relations, Juliane’s research explores ways in which our socio-digital and datafied futures are made and (can be) re-made in three domains: the public sector, education and demographic ageing. Juliane joined the University of Bremen in 2014 and is co-founder of its Data Science Center. Prior to Bremen, she worked as a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Technology and Organisation at Lancaster University. In 2014, she completed her PhD in Organisation, Work and Technology at Lancaster University Management School. Prior to her PhD studies, she earned degrees in MSc Information Technology, Management and Organisational Change (Lancaster University); MA Philosophy (Hamburg University) and BSc Informatics (Hamburg University). Since 2009, Juliane serves as an independent expert to the European Commission within the areas eInfrastructures, Data Infrastructures and Digital Science. She co-edited The Datafication of Education (with Andreas Breiter, 2019) and Probes as Participatory Design Practice (with Susanne Maaß, 2018). In 2020 she published the open access monograph Co-creating Digital Public Services for an Ageing Society. Her most recent book is the edited, open access volume New Perspectives in Critical Data Studies: The Ambivalences of Data Power (with Andreas Hepp and Leif Kramp, 2022).

Monika Halkort

Senior Lecturer, University of Applied Arts, Vienna

Monika’s research interrogates the material entanglement of contemporary techno-scientific infrastructures and data practices with colonial knowledge regimes. She just recently took up a position as curriculum developer and senior lecturer for the MA program in Applied Human Rights and the Arts in Vienna, following 10 years of teaching and research at the department of Communication Arts of the Lebanese American University (LAU) in Beirut, Lebanon. Her academic writing traverses the fields of political and moral ecology, feminist STS and decolonial theory and has been published in peer reviewed academic journals such as the International Journal for Communication, the Canadian Journal of Communication, and Tecnoscienza as well as in edited books, including Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping, edited by Doug Specht (University of London Press, 2020) and Oceans Rising, edited by Daniela Zyman and Markus Reyman (Sternberg Press, 2021). The main geographic focus of her work is the Arab world and the Mediterranean South.

Tracey P. Lauriault

Associate Professor, Critical Media and Big Data, Communication and Media Studies, School of Journalism and Communications, Carleton University

Cross Appointed to Digital Humanities, and is board member of the Institute for Data Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Her ongoing work on open data, open government, big data, smart cities, and data preservation is international, transdisciplinary, and multi-sectoral. Her current research interests are in digital twins, data brokers, Indigenous data, disaggregated equity data and data governance. Lauriault is one of the founders of the field critical data studies, open data and Open Smart Cities, AI & trust, taking a data and technology governance approach to the shaping of large complex systems. As a publicly engaged scholar, she mobilizes her research into data and technology policy across sectors. As a data and technological citizen, she examines large and small data and technology systems with the hope of making them more just, inclusive, equitable and environmentally sustainable.