Dr Alison Powell and Dr Philipp Seuferling investigate how deceptive stories about technology and innovation cause epistemic harm, including in public service contexts.
Dr Alison Powell’s research also investigates design, policy and cultural interventions to mitigate or avoid this harm by foregrounding individual and collective agency. Working with collaborators across Europe, it focuses on healthcare and environment contexts and includes work on shaping urban design futures to safeguard biodiversity and ecological health, and designing healthcare or public service technology around existing knowledge and workplace practices.
The Digital Futures for Children centre is pursuing multiple questions concerning children’s rights in the digital environment, including the potential of artificial intelligence to realise or undermine children’s participation, protection, privacy and education. Also in focus is the effectiveness of the unfolding regimes for regulating digital technologies around the world, and the role of United Nations agencies in embedding children’s rights in the provision and management of digital technologies.
Professor Charlie Beckett’s JournalismAI project has now doubled in scale with the new Innovation Challenge grantmaking programme.
Professor Bart Cammaerts intends to research The War on Woke, which will culminate in a monographfocussing on the war against LGBTQ, the war against anti-racism and DEI, the war against human rights and democracy, the weaponisation of freedom of speech and perpetratorvictim reversal.
Professor Bart Cammaerts will continue to work on his project The History of Media, Communication and Social Change. This project aims to use storytelling and documentary filmmaking in the context of civic education, both directed at adults and teenagers. Funding will be sought to enable archival research, as well as the development of scripts for documentary filmmaking of the stories, and teacher packs so the documentary series can be used in schools in the context of civic education.
Dr César Jiménez-Martínez is conducting research on the paradoxical nature of digital national borders, by drawing attention to the role of everyday borderwork, that is, people’s everyday and often taken-for-granted encounters with national borders in the digital domain. It does so by examining people’s use of digital media and devices across media environments in the UK, Europe and Latin America. The study aims to contribute to a better understanding of how national borders operate digitally, shedding light on more nuanced understandings of nationalism and migration, while highlighting new types of inequalities.
Dr Seeta Peña Gangadharan is studying the terrain of digital rights in research and innovation policy on the development of networked quantum computing, also known as quantum internet.