The Institute meets monthly to exchange updates on projects and share ideas.

Javier Ruiz-Soler took part in the CIGI's Social Hour on Deplatforming Social Media

Conspiratorialism as Dangerous Play in an age of Technofinance: From the GameStop Hunger Games to the Capitol Hill Jamboree We approach contemporary reactionary conspiratorialism as a dangerous form of play that emerges from gamified neoliberal financialization. Our examples are (1) the siege of the US Capitol of January 6 by those loyal to outgoing president […]

Wendy gives the keynote on Facing Recognition – Talk and Discussion at the Other(ing) Sensing. Practices, Politics and Ethics of Sensitive Media - Conference by the research group "SENSING: The Knowledge of Sensitive Media" at the University of Potsdam. What does recognition mean in an era of pervasive data capture and automatic pattern detection? Tracing […]

This part-time, five-day course offers foundational Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data science concepts that are applicable in the humanities and social sciences. Offered by SFU's Digital Democracies Institute and SFU’s Big Data Initiative, this course will have you examine best practices to critically evaluate and mitigate unwanted bias from sources such as data, algorithms […]

The implicit feudalism of online communities An “implicit feudalism” informs the available options for community management on the dominant platforms for online communities. It is a pattern that grants user-administrators absolutist reign over their fiefdoms, with competition among them as the primary mechanism for quality control, typically under rules set by platform companies. Implicit feudalism […]

Aleena Leng An Chia is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication specializing in the ethnography of gaming cultures. Her research investigates practices at the margins of the digital and analogue, and in the interstices between work and play. Her work examines gaming's boundary work as structuring categories in post-Fordism, as achievement systems in player communities, […]

The Institute meets monthly to exchange updates on projects and share ideas.

Wendy gives a keynote at Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power (A Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar) at Cambridge, part of the Summer School on the same topic. The University of Cambridge is hosting a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power from May 2020–April 2021. The Seminar is co-hosted by the Department […]

Caroline’s work is at the interface of mathematics and the epidemiology and evolution of pathogens. She holds a Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematics for Evolution, Infection and Public Health. In this group we develop mathematical tools connecting sequence data to the ecology and evolution of infections. She also has a long-standing interest on the dynamics […]

Prof. Gillespie's research focuses on the ongoing controversies surrounding digital media and commercial providers. His past work examined the move to technical solutions to copyright, their political and cultural implications, and how this move reveals underlying tensions between law, technology, and culture. His new research examines the implications of online media platforms as the new […]

Fenwick McKelvey studies algorithmic media – the intensification of software within communication infrastructure – through cases such as advanced Internet traffic management software and political campaign management software. His approach contributes to communication studies by demonstrating the opportunities to integrate software studies into the field while raising questions about the imbrication of software and communication. […]