Ruha Benjamin is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she studies the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. She is also the founder of the JUST DATA Lab and the author of two books, People’s Science (Stanford) and Race After Technology (Polity), and editor of Captivating Technology (Duke). Ruha writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the relationship between knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice.
Tom Boellstorff is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. From 2007–2012 he was Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. He is the author of the books The Gay Archipelago, A Coincidence of Desires, and Coming of Age in Second Life. He is also the coauthor of Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. With Bill Maurer, he is coeditor of Data, Now Bigger and Better! and Series Editor for the Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology (Princeton University Press).
Geoffrey C. Bowker is Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the School of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine, where he directs a laboratory for Values in the Design of Information Systems and Technology. Recent positions include Professor of and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship at the University of Pittsburgh iSchool and Executive Director, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara Together with Leigh Star he wrote Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences; his most recent book is Memory Practices in the Sciences.
Darren Byler is a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington in 2018. His research focuses on Uyghur dispossession, culture work and “terror capitalism” in the city of Ürümchi, the capital of Chinese Central Asia (Xinjiang). He has published research articles in the Asia-Pacific Journal, Contemporary Islam, Central Asian Survey, the Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art. He has provided expert testimony on Uyghur human rights issues before the Canadian House of Commons and writes a regular column on these issues for SupChina. He also writes and curates the digital humanities art and politics repository The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which is hosted at livingotherwise.com.
Noam Cohen is a former tech columnist for The New York Times, where he wrote the “Link by Link” column from 2007 to 2013, covering the influence of digital technologies on global culture and the economy. His work included some of the Times’ earliest coverage of Wikipedia, Bitcoin, and Twitter. His front-page stories reported on the first big Wikileaks leak (co-reported with Brian Stelter in 2010), Wikipedia’s contributor gender gap in 2011, and the investigation and death of Reddit co-founder and Internet activist Aaron Swartz in 2013. Cohen has also contributed to publications such as New York Magazine and Dissent and has appeared on NPR’s
“Talk of the Nation” and in the award-winning documentary Page One.
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger. He is the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and Little Brother, and novels for adults like Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London
Rose Eveleth is a producer, host, reporter and writer based in Berkeley, CA. She’s been a columnist for WIRED, BBC Future and Motherboard, the producer of the Story Collider, the special media manager at Nautilus, a new digital magazine about science, culture and philosophy, and the managing editor for LadyBits, a place where women are smart about science. She also edited the Smart News blog at Smithsonian Magazine, and founded Science Studio, a home for all the best science multimedia on the web. Most recently she helped ESPN’s award winning documentary series 30 for 30 launch their podcast. These days she’s the producer and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about the future.
Misha Glenny is an award-winning journalist who made a name for himself as the BBC’s Central Europe Correspondent covering the 1989 revolutions and the wars in the former Yugoslavia. He has a Sony Gold Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcasting and is also a winner of BT’s Information Security Journalist of The Year. He is regularly consulted by governments and law enforcement agencies in Europe and the Americas on the Balkans and Eastern Europe; on trans-national organized crime and on cybersecurity. He is also a regular contributor to major publications in Europe, North America and Japan.
Michele Goodwin is a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. She is also faculty in the Stem Cell Research Center; Gender and Sexuality Studies Department; Program in Public Health; and the Department of Criminology, Law, & Society. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute as well as an elected Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the Hastings Center. She is an American Law Institute Adviser for the Restatement Third of Torts: Remedies. Professor Goodwin is the author of books including Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts (2006) and Baby Markets: Money and the Politics of Creating Families (2010).
Erika Hayasaki is an associate professor of literary journalism at UC Irvine and a 2018 Alicia Patterson Fellow in science and environmental reporting. Her feature stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, Newsweek, TIME, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, Slate, Pacific Standard, Foreign Policy, Glamour, The Wall Street Journal, and more. She is a former New York-based national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, where she spent nine years covering breaking news and writing feature stories, and she is the author of The Death Class: A True Story About Life (Simon & Schuster 2014). She is a Los Angeles editor for Narratively, and the author of two Kindle Singles, “Dead or Alive” (2012), and “Drowned by Corn” (2014), both Amazon bestsellers.
Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, which has been awarded the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine.
Malavika Jayaram is the inaugural Executive Director of Digital Asia Hub, a Hong Kong-based independent research think-tank incubated by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where she is also a Faculty Associate. A technology lawyer for over 15 years, she practiced law at Allen & Overy, London, and was Vice President and Technology Counsel at Citigroup. She was featured in the International Who’s Who of Internet e-Commerce & Data Protection Lawyers, and voted one of India’s leading lawyers. She is on the Advisory Boards of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and Mozilla’s Tech Policy Fellowship, and on the Executive Committee of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. Malavika is an Associate Fellow with Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), as part of its Asia-Pacific Programme. She is also a member of the High-level Expert Advisory Group to the OECD project, “Going Digital: Making the Transformation Work for Growth and Well-being.”
David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. His 2019 book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports), explores the ways in which companies, governments and activists struggle to define the rules for online expression. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, he has also published essays in such publications as Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, JustSecurity and The Los Angeles Times.
Kate Klonick is an Assistant Professor at Law at St. John’s University Law School and an Affiliate Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Her current research focuses on the development of Facebook’s new Oversight Board — an independent body that will hear appeals on content from Facebook users and advise the platform about its online speech policies. Klonick clerked for the Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit and the Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York. Her research has explored the Internet’s effect on freedom of expression and private platform governance, online shaming, artificial intelligence, robotics, content moderation, algorithms, privacy, and intellectual property.
Rebecca MacKinnon is director of Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) at New America, a program that works to promote freedom of expression and privacy on the internet by creating global standards and incentives for companies to respect and protect users’ rights. RDR’s Corporate Accountability Index ranks the world’s most powerful internet, mobile, and telecommunications companies on relevant commitments and policies, based on international human rights standards. In the academic year 2019-2020, she is also a University of California Freedom of Speech and Civic Engagement Fellow and a UC San Diego Pacific Leadership Fellow. Author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (Basic Books, 2012) MacKinnon is co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices. She currently serves on the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists and was a founding member of the Global Network Initiative.
An Xiao Mina is an affiliate researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and was a 2016 Knight Visiting Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where she studied online language barriers and their impact on journalism. Mina has spoken at venues such as Creative Mornings, Harvard Law School, the Personal Democracy Forum, the International Journalism Festival, UC Berkeley, ACM SIGCHI, and AspenFILM at the Aspen Institute. She is also co-founder of The Civic Beat, a global research collective focused on the creative side of civic technology. Mina is author of Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power (Beacon Press, January 2019).
Kavita Philip is Professor of History at UC Irvine, with specializations in modern South Asia, environmental history, and the history of computing. Her publications have engaged with debates in feminist science and technology studies (STS), art and science, global development, intellectual property rights, and new media theory. She is the author or editor of several books, including Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources and Modernity in Colonial South India and Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience.
L. Song Richardson is the Dean and Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law with joint appointments in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and in the Department of Asian American Studies. Her interdisciplinary research uses lessons from cognitive and social psychology to study decision-making and judgment in a variety of contexts. Her scholarship has been published by law journals at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Duke and Northwestern, among others. Her co-edited book, The Constitution and the Future of Criminal Justice in America,was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. She is a co-editor of Criminal Procedure, Cases and Materials published by West Academic Publishing. Currently, she is working on a book that examines the history of race in the U.S. and its implications for law and policy.
Neil Sahota (萨冠军) is an IBM Master Inventor, United Nations (UN) Artificial Intelligence (AI) subject matter expert, and Lecturer at UC Irvine. With 20+ years of business experience, he works with clients and business partners to create next-generation products/solutions powered by AI. His work experience spans multiple industries including legal services, healthcare, life sciences, retail, travel and transportation, energy and utilities, automotive, telecommunications, media/communication, and government.
Bruce Sterling is a science fiction writer and internationally recognized cyberspace theorist. He is the author of Involution Ocean, Heavy Weather, Islands in the Net, Schismatrix, and The Artificial Kid, among other books. In 2003, Bruce Sterling became a professor of internet studies and science fiction at The European Graduate School, where he teaches intensive Summer seminars. In 2005, he became “visionary in residence” at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. As well as being a leading science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling has been involved with numerous projects and written several books of futurist theory. He was the founder of the Dead Media Project, an on-line reliquary, or archive, to forgotten, or dead, media technologies.
Lucy Suchman is a Professor of the Anthropology of Science and Technology at Lancaster University in the UK. Before taking up her present post she was a Principal Scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where she spent twenty years as a researcher. Lucy is the author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007) and Plans and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication (1987), both published by Cambridge University Press. She was a founding member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Lucy’s current research extends her longstanding engagement with the field of artificial intelligence to challenge the place of robots in both healthcare and warfare.
Jasmina Tešanović is an author, feminist, political activist, translator, and filmmaker. In 1978, together with Zarana Papić and Dunja Blazević, she organized the first Feminist Conference in Eastern Europe. She has also translated Italian authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Sandro Veronesi, Andrea de Carlo, and Aldo Busi, and published an anthology of contemporary Italian literature. Her first book of essays, The Invisible Book, became a manifesto for alternative Serbian feminist/pacifist culture. Since then she has published several other books of fiction and essays, which have been translated into several languages.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he is also a Professor of Law, by courtesy, and Historical Writing Mentor for the Literary Journalism Program. His most recent books are, as author, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2013) and, as editor, The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (forthcoming 2016). He has written for many magazines (such as Index on Censorship, Slate, and New Left Review) and a wide variety of newspapers, blogs, and journals of opinion. He is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine, and is the advising editor for China for the Los Angeles Review of Books. His newest book, Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, will be published by Columbia Global Reports in February of 2020.
Peggy Weil is an artist whose works explore our changing physical, digital and sociopolitical landscapes. Her work has been exhibited internationally including work for CURRENT:LA Water in Los Angeles; The Climate Museum in NYC, MMOMA in Moscow, and LABoral in Spain. 88 Cores was featured at the United Nations for the Secretary General’s address on Climate Action in 2018. 3D Wallpaper was on view as part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibit, 3D: Double Vision.
Amy Wilentz is a professor of literary journalism at UC Irvine and the author of Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (2013), The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (1990), Martyrs’ Crossing (2000), and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger (2006). She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award. She won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for memoir for Farewell, Fred Voodoo. Wilentz is the former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation.