Funding and Advisory Board
The research project was funded by the British Academy (2018 – 2019) and relied on the valuable advice of an international board of experts who work at the intersection of three different fields: a) data and society b) digital methods and data ethnography c) childhood publics. Please note that although they have granted me their support, they are not responsible for any of the views expressed on this website.
Prof. Tom Boellstorff is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, U.S. He is a leading expert in ethnographic methodologies and virtual worlds, and is the author of many articles and books including Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (2015). He is also the coauthor of Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: a Handbook of Method (2012) and the coeditor of Data, Now Bigger and Better (2015).
Dr Lina Dencik, Senior Lecturer at Cardiff’s School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies and serves as Director of the newly established Data Justice Lab. She has worked on the ESRC-funded project Digital Citizenship and Surveillance Society and the project Managing Threats: Social Media Uses for Policing Domestic Extremism and Disorder funded by the Media Democracy Fund, Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations. She has published extensively in the field of digital participation, citizenship and data justice.
Prof. Greg Elmer, Bell Globemedia Research Chair and Director of the Infoscape research lab, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. Prof. Elmer’s research focuses on theories of surveillance, social protest, political communication, and media financialisation. He is the author of the groundbreaking book on data privacy titled Profiling Machines: Mapping the Personal Information Economy (MIT Press: 2004).
Dr. Arne Hintz, is a Senior Lecturer at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. His research connects communication policy, media activism, and digital citizenship. Recently, he was Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project Digital Citizenship and Surveillance Society: UK State-Media-Citizen Relations After the Snowden Leaks (2014-16), and he co-chairs the JOMEC Research Group Digital Media and Society and the Data Justice Lab.
Dr. Tama Leaver is an Associate Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth. His research expertise includes online identity, social media, digital death, infancy online, mobile gaming and the changing landscape of media distribution. He is the author of Artificial Culture: Identity, Technology and Bodies (Routledge, 2012); co-editor of An Education in Facebook? Higher Education and the World’s Largest Social Network (Routledge, 2014) with Mike Kent; and Social, Casual and Mobile Games: The Changing Gaming Landscape (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) with Michele Willson.
Prof. Sonia Livingstone, is Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at London School of Economics, UK, and has dedicated much of her research to children, media and the Internet. She is author or editor of nineteen books and many academic articles and chapters. She was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2014 ‘for services to children and child internet safety.’ She serves on the Executive Board of the UK’s Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS), for which she is the Evidence Champion. She has served on the Department of Education’s Ministerial Taskforce for Home Access to Technology for Children, the Home Secretary’s Taskforce for Child Protection on the Internet and the boards of Voice of the Listener and Viewer and the Internet Watch Foundation.
Dr. Mirca Madianou, Reader in the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths University of London, UK. Dr Madianou research covers the social uses and consequences of communication technologies in a transnational and comparative context. She have directed two Economic and Social Research Council grants: Humanitarian Technologies and Migration, ICTS and transnational families which have led to several publications on the social consequences of new communication technologies among marginalised and migrant populations. She is the chair of the Philosophy, Theory and Critique division of the International Communication Association.
Prof. Annette Markham is Professor of Information Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark & Affiliate Professor of Digital Ethics in the School of Communication at Loyola University, Chicago. She researches how identity, relationships, and cultural formations are constructed in and influenced by digitally saturated socio-technical contexts. She is a world leader on internet research methods and ethics. She is the author of Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space (1998), which has become a groundbreaking book in the field of internet studies.
Prof. Sarah Pink, is the Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and Distinguished Professor of Design and Media Ethnography at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Prof. Pink’s research combines theoretical and methodological scholarship with applied practice. She works across themes including digital media, energy, consumption, everyday life, sustainability, activism, tacit and sensory ways of knowing, safety and health and the construction industry. She researches across urban, domestic and workplace environment.
Dr. Melissa Sevasti Nolas, is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Work and Social Care at the University of Sussex, UK and the Principal Investigator on the ERC Connectors: an international study into the development of children’s everyday practices of participation in circuits of social action. Dr Sevasti Nolas expertise covers childhood publics, children’s participation rights, youth development, participatory programming and evaluation, ethnography, and qualitative research methods.