Clemens Apprich is professor in media theory and history at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He studied philosophy, political science, cultural history and theory in Berlin, Bordeaux, and Vienna. In 2011 he became research associate at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, where he was also guest professor from 2017 to 2018. From 2018 to 2019 he was a visiting research fellow at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University in Montréal, and from 2020 to 2021 assistant professor in media studies at the University of Groningen. Clemens Apprich is guest researcher at the Centre for Digital Cultures (Leuphana University), as well as affiliated member of the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies (University of Groningen), the Digital Democracies Institute (Simon Fraser University), the Global Emergent Media Lab (Concordia University), and the Research College ‘Sensing’ (Potsdam University). His current research deals with filter algorithms and their application in data analysis as well as machine learning methods. He is the author of ‘Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures’ (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), and, together with Wendy Chun, Hito Steyerl, and Florian Cramer, co-authored ‘Pattern Discrimination’ (University of Minnesota Press/meson press, 2019). In addition, he acts as reviewer for a range of international journals as well as academic publishers (e.g. Big Data & Society, Space and Culture, Theatre Journal, First Monday, Cambridge University Press), and is a founding co-editor of spheres – Journal for Digital Cultures (www.spheres-journal.org).

Timon Beyes is Professor of Sociology of Organisation and Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany and at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is a director of Lüneburg’s Centre for Digital Cultures. His research focuses on the spaces, technologies and aesthetics of organization in the fields of media culture, art, cities as well as higher education. Recent and forthcoming publications include ‘The media arcane’ (with C. Pias, Grey Room 75, 2019); The Creativity Complex. A Companion to Contemporary Culture (ed., with J. Metelmann, Bielefeld 2018); The Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology and Organization Studies (ed., with R. Holt and C. Pias, Oxford 2019); Organize (with L. Conrad and R. Martin, Minneapolis 2019).

Sheffield University

 Kings College, London

University of Canterbury

Melody Devries is a PhD candidate in the Communication & Culture department at Ryerson University, is a recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier (CGS) Doctoral Scholarship, and holds an MA in anthropology from the University of Toronto. Her doctoral work uses ethnographic methods and theories of relationality and performativity to examine how contemporary far/right online communities exist in tandem with mainstream politics. Apart from working with SFU’s Digital Democracies Institute and Ryerson’s Infoscape Research Lab, she is currently co-editing a volume concerning the role of technologies in processes of far-right recruitment and mobilization.

Greg Elmer is a Professor at Ryerson University and the Director of Catalyst, a research space in the Faculty of Communication and Design. His research focuses on how social media platforms have changed and reconfigured poltical communications and electorial campaigns, as well as research investigating the roles that media and social media play in organising reporting on political protest and dissent. He is currently writing a book on the financial histories of social media companies. 

Queen Mary University of London, a practice-based researcher and artist investigating (de)colonial politics of algorithmic and logistical infrastructures in post-Soviet space.

Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University, and (by courtesy) Religious Studies (RS) and Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS). She is author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993, Scripps Prize for best first book), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, 2009, David Easton Prize), Antigone, Interrupted. (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham, 2017). She has edited or co-edited several collections, including Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Penn State, 1995) and Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier (Oxford, 2016).  Her articles have appeared in Arethusa (Okin-Young Prize for best article in feminist theory), New Literary History, Political Theory, Theory&Event,Social Text, differences, the American Political Science Review, and more.  She is currently writing a book based on her 2017 Flexner Lectures, titled: “Give me glory” – Feminism and the Politics of Refusal. Her most recent publication is “12 Angry Men: Care for the Agon and the Varieties of Masculinity,” fc Theory&Event 2019.

Ioana Jucan is a PhD candidate in the Theatre and Performance Studies program at Brown. Her research lies at the intersection of theatre and performance studies, philosophy, and media studies. Her dissertation is entitled “Out of Concern: Performance Modes of Engaging with the World.” Her writing has appeared in journals (TDR: The Drama Review; Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies; Parallax; Revista Caracteres; Nerve Lantern) and in edited volumes (most recently, in Adorno and Performance; Palgrave, 2014). At Brown, Jucan runs the Performance (and) Philosophy working group affiliated with the Performance Philosophy research network.

In the Fall 2015, Jucan was the Brown/Wheaton Faculty Fellow in Theatre and Dance at Wheaton College (Norton, MA). She is currently guest researcher at the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Yale Law School

Kara Keeling is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. Her research has focused on African American cinema and media; theories of race, sexuality, and gender in cinema; critical theory; and cultural studies. Her book The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007) explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life. Keeling’s second monograph, Queer Times, Black Futures, will be published by New York University Press in the spring of 2019.

Laura Kurgan is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she directs the Center for Spatial Research and the Visual Studies curriculum. She is the author of Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013). Her work explores the ethics and politics of digital mapping and its technologies; the art, science and visualization of big and small data; and design environments for public engagement with maps and data. From 2004 – 2015, she founded and directed the Spatial Information Design Lab at GSAPP. The SIDL “Million Dollar Blocks” project is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and her work has also been shown at Palais De Tokyo and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, MACBa in Barcelona and the ZKM in Karlsruhe. In 2009, Kurgan was awarded a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship.

Ganaele Langlois is Associate Professor at York University, expert in digital cultures, at York University, Canada, and Associate Director of the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media (www.infoscapelab.ca). Her research interests lie in media theory and critical theory, particularly with regards to the shaping of subjectivity and agency through and with media technologies. She published a book entitled Meaning in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave, 2014). Professor Langlois is currently co-principal investigator on a SSHRC standard research grant to study the politics of social media platforms. She has co-edited a book on the topic entitled Compromised Data? From Social Media to Big Data (Bloomsbury, 2015). She is currently working on a research project about textile as communication. Her research has been published in New Media and Society, Culture Machine, Communication and Critical-Cultural Studies, Television and New Media, and Fibreculture.

Patrick Jagoda is Professor of Cinema & Media Studies and English at the University of Chicago. He is Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry and director of the Weston Game Lab. He is also co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and Transmedia Story Lab, and a member of the Fourcast Lab collective. Patrick’s books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016), and Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020), as well as several edited volumes and journal special issues. He is currently working on his next book, Story Lab: Narrative Methods for a Transmedia Era. He has also designed numerous alternate reality games, video games, and board games about issues that include climate change, public health, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Patrick is a recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.

City University of New York

Tara McPherson is Chair and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies.  She is a core faculty member of the IMAP program, USC’s innovative practice based-Ph.D., and also an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department.  Her research engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect and place.  She has a particular interest in digital media.  Here, her research focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.  

Lisa Nakamura is Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  She is the inaugural Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and a founding member of the Precarity Lab collective (precaritylab.org)

She is the author of four books on race, gender, and digital media and gaming.  She is currently working on a book on women of color’s work building the Internet, and how the internet defined woman of color identity in the 21^st century.  Her areas of interest include histories of indigenous electronic manufacture in post-war America, content moderation by women of color on social media, and virtual reality’s claims to produce racial and gender empathy. 

University of Illinois at Chicago

Richard Rogers, PhD holds the Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is Director of the Digital Methods Initiative, which develops tools and methods for ‘natively digital’ research. Among other works, Rogers is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004), awarded the best book of the year by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), and Digital Methods (MIT Press, 2013) awarded Outstanding Book of the Year from the International Communication Association (ICA). Rogers is a three-time Ford Fellow and has received research grants from the Soros Foundation, Open Society Institute, Mondriaan Foundation, MacArthur Foundation and Gates Foundation. His most recent book is Doing Digital Methods (Sage, 2019).

University of California, Irvine

Dr. Heidi Tworek is Assistant Professor of International History at the University of British Columbia. Her further research interests include contemporary media and communications, German and transatlantic politics, the digital economy, the history of technology, legal history, digital history, the history of health, and higher education. Heidi is committed to bringing a historical sensibility to policy discussions and has briefed or advised officials and policymakers from multiple European and North American governments on media, democracy, and the digital economy. She also writes in English and German for many media outlets as well as appearing regularly on national radio and television in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Her latest book, News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945 was published in 2019 by Harvard University Press. 

CNRS, France

University of Amsterdam

Texas A&M University and University of Amsterdam, who researches how invisible infrastructures provide a sociotechnical ordering to information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power and possibilities.