Dr. Josie Barnard is Associate Professor in Creative and Digital Practice and Subject Leader of Creative Writing at De Montfort University (UK). Her research centres on the application of creativity to enabling ‘future-proofing’ digital engagement. Her digital engagement research is the subject of a REF2021 Impact Case Study, ‘Bridging the Digital Divide: Creativity research resulting in digital upskilling’. It is represented by her monograph The Multimodal Writer: Creative Writing Across Genres and Media (Bloomsbury, 2019), her BBC Radio 4 programme, Digital Future: the New Underclass (2019) and outputs including ‘Cyber Nuts and Bolts: Effective Participatory Online Learning, Theory and Practice’ (Convergence, 2023). She has developed an empirically tested pedagogical model for teaching digital literacy. She collaborates with government departments and other key stakeholder groups to inform policy and develop digital inclusion. The award-winning author of six books, extensive print and broadcast journalism and international academic articles and chapters, Josie is invited co-editor of a Special Issue of the international academic journal Writing in Practice (2022), on the subject of her multimodal writing research, a field that she has pioneered. She is, alongside writers including Dame Penelope Lively and Sir Roy Strong, the subject of a chapter in Sue Gee’s Just You and the Page: Twelve writers and their art (Seren, 2021).
Burcu Baykurt is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. In Spring/Summer 2023, she is a fellow at the Academy of International Affairs NRW in Germany. Her research focuses on the critical study of technology and culture and their role in the reproduction of social inequalities.
Dr. Matthew Bui (he/him) is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, and a faculty affiliate with the NYU Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies (CR+DS) and UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). Bui’s research examines the potential for, and barriers to, urban data justice, foregrounding the racial politics of data-driven technologies, policy, and initiatives. His research has received support from the Annenberg Foundation, Benton Foundation, Democracy Fund, Kauffman Foundation, and Urban Communication Foundation; and received scholarly recognition from the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and the Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC). Prior to UMSI, Bui was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Tech. He received his PhD and MA from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.
Nicole is a critical communications scholar and doctoral student at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism who studies Black women’s activism, affect, and online social movements. Nicole is interested in how Black female wellbeing online communities labor practices constitute an affective discursive structure that can empower Black female activists and contradict post-feminist ideologies throughout mainstream media. Nicole graduated from Pepperdine University in 2017 with a Master of Art in Strategic Communication. Nicole holds her Master of Communication Management from the University of Southern California (2010) and received her B.A. in English from Georgetown University (2009). Nicole’s work has been included in the handbook, The Rhetoric of Social Movements: Networks, Power, and New Media (Crick et al., 2020), as well as in the Journal of Children and Media. Nicole has also presented at the 2021 National Communication Association Conference, as well as the 2022 Cultural Studies Association Conference.
Curry Chandler is a Gerda Henkel Foundation research grantee and Instructor at the University of Pittsburgh. I specialize in urban communication studies with an emphasis on emerging media technologies and the rhetoric of space and place. My scholarship in this area has been published in Western Journal of Communication, Urban Geography, and the Urban Communication Reader vol. IV. My current research project examines rhetorics of community resistance to corporate-driven development in the context of smart city discourses and platform urbanism.
Yuchen Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. Her research looks at the transnational and technologically-mediated flows of people, culture and capital between the U.S. and China. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies, Critical Cultural Geography, and Critical Ethnic Studies, her dissertation looks into the emerging geographies of “Chinese alienness” in New York City and how they are transnationally and sociotechnically produced by assemblages of actors, companies, and platforms.
Dave Colangelo is an artist, educator, and researcher based in Toronto, Canada. He is a founding member of Public Visualization Studio. His work focuses on urban media environments as sites for critical and creative engagements with the city, public art, and information. He is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Creation and Communication in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and Director, North America, of the Media Architecture Institute. He is also Co-Director of RyeLights at TMU. Previously, he has held positions as Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Culture at Portland State University in the School of Film, Adjunct Professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in the Digital Futures MA/MDes/MFA program, and Professor and Academic Coordinator of the Bachelor of Digital Experience Design program in the School of Design at George Brown College.
Laura Guimarães Corrêa is an Associate Professor at the Social Communication Department of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. She holds a PhD in Communication from the same institution and is the former director of the Advertising and Propaganda undergraduate course at UFMG. She was a Visiting Fellow at London School of Economics and Political Science (2015-2016) and is currently a Visiting Research Fellow attached to the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, UK, researching intersectional theory, funded by Capes (2022-2023). She is a board member of Ciseco (International Association of Semiotics and Communication) and the leader of Coragem (Research Group on Communication, Race and Gender of UFMG). Among other publications in Portuguese and English, Laura edited the book “Vozes Negras em Comunicação: mídia, racismos, resistências” (2019), and is currently co-editing the "Vozes Negras em Comunicação II: caminhos, interseções e encruzilhadas" (due 2023), with Black media and communication scholars.
Emese Domahidi studied Media and Communication Science, Modern German Literature and Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. From January 2010 until September 2012 she worked as a research assistant in the ERC project “The social fabric of virtual life: A longitudinal multi-method study on the social foundations of online gaming (SOFOGA)” with Prof. Dr. Thorsten Quandt at the University of Hohenheim. From October 2012 until May 2015 she was employed as a research assistant in the ERC project SOFOGA with Prof. Dr. Thorsten Quandt at the University of Münster. In September 2015 she obtained a doctorate with her thesis “Online Media Use and Perceived Social Resources. A Meta-Analysis” at the University of Münster. From August 2015 until September 2017 she did her postdoc at the junior research group Social Media with Prof. Dr. Sonja Utz at Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien in Tübingen. Her research is concerned with the analysis of digital media content and communication processes, as well as the associated changes for individuals and society. Her main research interests are in the fields of information search in digital media, (cognitive) biases during the reception of digital media, and social consequences of online media use. Besides traditional methods of communication science, Emese Domahidi also focuses on the application, improvement, and evaluation of computational methods for communication science.
Arlene Fernández is a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She situates her work at the intersection of cultural studies, urban media studies, and ethnic studies, with an emphasis on Black and Latine quotidian urban life in the Americas. Her current project interrogates the ways in which narratives about urban spaces, ethno-racial and colonial politics, socioeconomic precarity, and urban technology are entangled in Latine corner stores in the U.S. As a media-maker, she is committed to a multimodal ethnographic research praxis that can serve as a potential vehicle for public engagement and translation, and as an opportunity for cultural reimaginings that center those at the margins. Arlene holds a Master of Social Work and bachelor’s degree in Urban Studies, both from the University of Pennsylvania.
Mariana Fried is a PhD student at the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research interests lie in the practices of individuals and groups who act as agents of discursive production and therefore of social transformation. Her current PhD project focuses on the discursive practices of workers in the so-called 'smart' city.
Myria Georgiou is Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Professor Georgiou researches and teaches on migration and urbanisation in the context of intensified mediation. Adopting a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, she is committed to putting the human of the urban, transnationally connected world at the core of her research. Specifically, in research conducted across 6 countries over the last 20 years, she has been studying communication practices and media representations that profoundly, but unevenly, shape meanings and experiences of citizenship and identity.
Germaine Halegoua’s research interests focus on the relationships between people, place, and digital media. In particular, she’s interested in how visions of digital media by public officials and urban planners often conflict with popular imaginations and everyday experiences of digital technologies and infrastructures. Her more recent projects investigate digital placemaking; smart cities; cultural geographies and inequities of digital infrastructure and access; social media in neighborhood contexts; and social productions of place and identity online. Her research and writing have been published in several anthologies, online venues, and journals including New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Urban Technology, Planning Practice and Research, and Urban Affairs Review. She is the author of The Digital City (NYU Press, 2020) and Smart Cities (MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, 2020), co-editor of Locating Emerging Media (Routledge, 2016) and a special issue of Convergence on “Digital Placemaking” (June 2021).
Joo-Young Jung (PhD, University of Southern California) is a Professor in the Department of Society, Culture and Media at International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. Her research interests include social implications of diverse types of communication media in particular spatial, social, and communication environments. She has examined new and old media in a variety of spatial contexts, such as urban and rural communities in different countries; in social contexts, such as disaster and post-disaster situations; and in changing communication environments. Her research has been published in numerous journals and edited books including Communication Research, New Media & Society, International Journal of Communication, Political Communication, Digital Journalism, Journal of Applied Communication Research, International Journal of Mobile Communications, and The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies.
Ekaterina is Assistant Professor at Department of Media and Communication Studies, Stocholm University, Sweden. Ekaterina has researched on memory, digital archives and nostalgia, information warfare and civic activism. Her major topics of interest are: Cultural Studies, Memory and Nostalgia, Digital Archives, Social Movements, Sustainability, Global Development and Youth Cultures. Ekaterina Kalinina is also active as a director of a Swedish NGO Nordkonst, which promotes cooperation and intercultural communication in the Baltic and the Nordic regions. She currently works on several exchange projects between the Nordic countries and France in the sphere of Hip Hop.
Carolyn L. Kane is the author of "High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure" (University of California Press, 2019) and "Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics After Code" (University of Chicago Press, 2014). She earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University (2011) and is now associate professor of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her current monograph, "Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America's White Imaginary" is forthcoming from the University of California Press in late 2023. More information can be found here: https://www.torontomu.ca/kane/
Levin Kim is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington Information School and an organizer with UAW 4121 (the union of academic workers at the University of Washington). Their work examines different intersecting aspects of institutions, bodies, and critical discourses around science and technology.
Yong-Chan Kim (PhD, University of Southern California) is a Professor at the Department of Communication at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. He is leading two research units at Yonsei: Urban Socio-Spatial Informatics Center and Urban Communication Lab. Before joining the faculty at Yonsei, he was on the faculty at the University of Iowa and the University of Alabama. For the last 15 years, his research program has been built around three key areas: urban communication, new media technology, and public health/risk. His most recent books include “The communication ecology of 21st century urban communities (Peter Lang) and “Media and community” (Culture Look). He has published more than 50 articles in prestigious journals including Communication Research, New Media & Society, Human Communication Research, Political Communication, Communication Theory, Journal of Health Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and others.
Zlatan Krajina (PhD Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London) is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the Department of Media and Communication, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. His monograph "Negotiating the Mediated City" (Routledge, 2014) was a finalist for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Award. His recent book is "The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication" (2020, co-edited with Deborah Stevenson). His research seeks to marry issues of everyday experiences of mediated urban spaces, especially screen technologies, with matters of identity, geography and power, particularly in the European context.
Allison Kwesell (PhD, International Christian University) is an Assistant Professor of communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fl. Her research interests include implications of perceived and self-stigma on vulnerable populations, visual narration as a tool to cope with post-trauma situations, effects of media photographs, and socio-psychological aspects of sustainable recovery. A former photojournalist, Kwesell moved to Japan four months after the Fukushima nuclear disaster and spent six years conducting research, working as a documentary photographer, and engaging in volunteer activities with her time split between Fukushima and Tokyo. Her research has been published in prestigious journals including Visual Communication, Visual Communication Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research, and Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research.
Jessa Lingel is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and core faculty in the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in communication and information from Rutgers University. She has an MLIS from Pratt Institute and an MA in gender studies from New York University. Her research interests include digital inequalities and technological distributions of power. Using qualitative methods, Lingel studies how marginalized and countercultural groups use and reshape digital media.
Matthew Matsaganis’ scholarship reflects his commitment to understanding the role of communication as a set of fundamental processes through which life in the communities we inhabit is organized and through which place affects our lives; notably, our health and our well-being, more broadly defined. As the global population is becoming increasingly urban, Matsaganis is particularly interested in the communities of 21st century cities. Cities may indeed be one of the greatest human inventions, but they are also sites of significant health, digital, and other social disparities that disproportionately affect some of the most vulnerable members of our societies. These include people of ethnic/racial minority backgrounds and immigrants. Because of these realities, Matsaganis' research, but also his teaching and service, goes beyond diagnosing the role of communication processes and dynamics in urban community life, and focuses on developing interventions that can help reduce, if not eliminate social inequalities. Central to these efforts is the notion that communication can also be leveraged as a mechanism to build residents’ capacity to effect positive community change.
Shiwei Mo is a graduate student in the School of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China. His research interests focus on media and urban geography, media archaeology, and media psychology. One of his lines of research is to investigate how communication technologies can facilitate spatial justice.
Dr. Rebecca Noone (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Information Studies, University College London (UCL) where she is the Associate Director of UCL’s Center for Digital Humanities. Situated in the areas of critical information studies and feminist media studies, Rebecca’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded research focuses on the politics, discourses, and practices of locative media. Rebecca has presented her resarch at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Information Science and Technology and the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, and has published in Qualitative Research, DRAIN, Journal of Education for Library and Information Science and the edited volume Visual Research Methods: An Introduction for Library and Information Studies. She is currently finishing a book manuscript titled Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps, under contract with Routledge (exp. 2023). She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto.
David Oh is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He has authored many articles and book chapters as well as three books in the areas of Asian/American representation in U.S. media culture, Asian American cultural workers, and transnational audience reception of Korean media. He also edited Mediating the Korean Other: Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State (University of Michigan Press) and a special forum about Squid Game in Communication, Culture, and Critique. Dr. Oh serves on multiple Editorial Boards in communication, cultural studies, and media studies, and he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to South Korea in 2018-19 at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.
Erika Polson is an associate professor in the department of Media, Film and Journalism Studies at the University of Denver. Her research involves critical cultural studies of digital media and mobility in global contexts, and specifically on new way that status is accrued or projected through mobilities. She is author of Privileged Mobilities: Professional Migration, Geo-social Media, and a New Global Middle Class (2016) and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Media and Class (2020).
Julian Posada is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His research integrates theories and methods from information studies, sociology, and human–computer interaction to study technology and society. His latest project explores how the artificial intelligence industry perpetuates coloniality by focusing on the relationship between human labor and data production. This research focuses on the experiences of outsourced workers in Latin America employed by digital platforms to produce machine learning data and verify algorithmic outputs. Posada’s research has been published in several influential journals, including Information, Communication & Society, and the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Alison Powell is Associate Professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She directs the JUST AI Network: Joining Up Society and Technology for AI, which is supported by the AHRC and the Ada Lovelace Institute. JUST AI creates alternative ethical spaces, practices and orientations towards the issue of data and AI ethics within a broad community of practice and its work is documented at https://just-ai.net. Her empirical research is focused on the ways technology-driven governance influences citizenship, especially in ‘smart cities’. In addition to her interest in optimization, citizenship and participation, Alison is also interested in just transitions, deep sustainability and radical futures. She is the author of Undoing Optimization: Civic Action and Smart Cities, published by Yale University Press.
Cerianne Robertson is a PhD Candidate at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. She researches the spatial practices, discourses, and infrastructures that sustain geographies of power, as well as the opportunities available to disrupt and change them. She is particularly interested in the stories we tell about cities and large-scale development projects. Cerianne previously worked as the Editor and Media Monitoring Coordinator for RioOnWatch.org, a Rio de Janeiro-based media platform that emerged to amplify favela resident perspectives and monitor urban transformations in the build-up to the 2016 Olympics.
Abhishek Sekharan is a doctoral student at the School of Information, University of Michigan. His research investigates the racialized, gendered, and caste’ed geographies of platform capitalism, and their implications for urban socio-spatial justice, with a particular focus on entrepreneurial cultures and infrastructures that drive platformization. Abhishek’s work is grounded in feminist, decolonial, and critical caste scholarship, while also borrowing from science and technology studies, and southern urban theory. His current research project examines the racialized spatial practices and labor cultures that percolate the platform-based grocery delivery ecosystem for Doordash in the Detroit Metropolitan Area.
Max Schindler, MA, is a PhD student at the Department of Communication Science with a focus on Computational Communication Science at Ilmenau University of Technology. His research focuses on communication in online and social media, especially user comments. He is part of a project that aims to make use of social media data in an urban context. Focusing on the information and support exchanged, the project aims to uncover the value of social media data for citizens, public institutions, and governments.
Lisa Schulze is a PhD student from the University of Salzburg, Austria. In her dissertation project, Two Wheels, One Route, she explores wheelchair users’ navigation practices and examines how media and other tools are used to plan and follow a route in urban and rural areas of Germany. Furthermore, Lisa is interested in mobile methods, practice theories, disability models, theories of space and media use research.
Anthony Vanky (he/him) is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Trained as an urban designer and planner, he focuses on technology-based practices in urban planning and design. Vanky’s research considers the use of digital data and pervasive sensing technologies in designing, planning, and evaluating urban environments and spans the disciplines of urban design, urban technologies, computational social science, innovation studies, and public health. Vanky has experience building innovative practices within the university, having helped shape the urban technology degree at the University of Michigan and developed MIT designX, an academic accelerator dedicated to advancing innovation and entrepreneurship in design, cities, and the built environment, as its first academic program manager. Vanky has consulted and widely presented on design, technology, and urbanism, including universities and national governments. His design work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Dutch Design Week, the Detroit Month of Design, New Orleans DesCours, and the Gwangju Design Biennial, among others.
My name is Wang Chong, a postgraduate student in Communication Studies at Fudan University in China. My research interests are in media technology and digital culture, and I have published several papers in journals and international conferences. My research focuses on empirical reality in the Chinese context, not as a dichotomy between East and West, but as an attempt to find blind spots in existing theory and enrich it.
Zhiwei Wang is a third-year PhD student in Sociology at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. His research interests include nations, nationalism and national identity; digital media and social media; cyberpunk culture; biopower and biopolitics; digital health; social capital; Marxism; neoliberalism; digital labour; agency and structure; surveillance; deviance; East Asia; and China. The topic of his PhD research is discursive (re)production of Internet-mediated Chinese national identity. He obtained an MA in Digital Media and Society from the University of Sheffield and a Bachelor of Literature in English (International Trade) from Hefei University of Technology. His publications include two book reviews: ‘How the State Builds Collective Identity through the Mass Media? Reading Media, State and Nation: Political Violence and Collective Identities (in Chinese)’ and ‘Jasper M. Trautsch (ed.), Civic Nationalisms in Global Perspective. Routledge, 2019.
Chamee Yang (she/her/hers) is a researcher, writer, and educator in critical media and information studies and science and technology studies (STS) in Asian and global cultural contexts. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Communication at the Seoul National University in South Korea and Research Affiliate at the School of Information at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently working on her first book, Remapping Smart Cities: A History of Technological Future in South Korea, which examines the history and politics of smart artifacts and environment and its intersection with Korean history of industrialization, urbanization, and militarization in the long twentieth century. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, and she has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Science, Technology, and Society Program and at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication.
Sherry S. Yu is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media, and the Faculty of Information. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from Simon Fraser University. Her research explores multiculturalism, media, and social integration. She is the author of Diasporic Media beyond the Diaspora: Korean Media in Vancouver and Los Angeles (2018, UBC Press) and the co-editor of Ethnic Media in the Digital Age (2019, Routledge). She is currently working on her second co-edited volume, The Handbook of Ethnic Media in Canada. Her research also has been published in scholarly journals such as Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, Journalism Studies, Television & New Media, Canadian Journal of Communication, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Canadian Ethnic Studies.
Yusuf Yüksekda is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Communication, Istanbul Bilgi University. He works and teaches in the fields of applied ethics, media studies and philosophy. He received his PhD from the Department of Culture and Communication, Linköping University, Sweden. He has worked on migration ethics in particular, and more recently he is concerned with media/data ethics, data relations and the ethics of smart cities.