The 3L Mantra to live by!

This November, I start the ZEMKI Fellowship at the University of Bremen.    The ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research is an interdisciplinary research environment in the areas of media, communication and information. Involved disciplines include communication and media studies, computer science, cultural studies, educational science, studies in religion, and history. Since mid-2017, the ZeMKI has been inviting applications from researchers in the field of media, communication, and information around the world to participate in their program.  During the Fellowship, I will be giving a talk on ' Benign dataveillance: a new kind of democracy? Examining the emerging data-based governance systems in India and China' as part of the ZEMKI lecture series.  While I am there, I will also be heading to Hamburg to give a public talk under the 'Taming the machines' theme organized by Judith Simon and her team from the University of Hamburg . ...

Amsterdam Privacy conference kicks off this weekend. Am doing a number of presentations at this conference which makes this quite a hectic few days to come. To start with, I am presenting with my co-author René König on " Imagining the “diversity algorithm: Alternatives in ideological governance and their challenges." Basically, we bring together two discourses and fields of study that have rarely intersected – sociology of diversity and computing studies to arrive at new understandings of the challenges that we face in the embedding of ‘diversity’ as a value in the design of net-based technologies. Our paper maps tensions among different diversity-driven cultures alongside the challenges that come with operationalizing them through technological design. This demands a re-examining of what constitutes as exclusion and inclusion, what is boundary-making for fair representation, is visibility empowering, and other such critical questions.  The fact is that diversity is a ri...