STS Italia

Keynotes

Ruha Benjamin

Princeton University

Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024) among other publication. 

Ruha is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and in 2024 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.

Shannon Vallor

University of Edinburgh

Professor Shannon Vallor serves as Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute and is Programme Director for EFI’s MSc in Data and AI Ethics. She holds the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Philosophy.

Professor Vallor joined the Futures Institute in 2020 following a career in the United States as a leader in the ethics of emerging technologies, including a post as a visiting AI Ethicist at Google from 2018-2020.

She is the author of The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford University Press, 2016).

She serves as advisor to government and industry bodies on responsible AI and data ethics. She is also Principal Investigator and Co-Director (with Professor Ewa Luger) of the UKRI research programme BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Alessandro Delfanti

University of Toronto

Alessandro Delfanti is a Professor of Culture and New Media at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, University of Toronto.

 

Professor Delfanti’s work lies at the intersection of digital cultures and science and technology studies. His work is focused on the political economy of communication, digital labour, hacking, social movements, as well as open science.

Karen
Gregory

University of Edinburgh

Karen Gregory is a digital sociologist and ethnographer. Her work explores the nature and experience of self-employment in the digital economy with a focus on platform labour, risk, and precarity. 

She is the founder of the MSc in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also the Lead for the Digital/Data Research Theme in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. She is also a co-lead for the Critical Data Studies Research Cluster at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

She is co-editor of the book Digital Sociologies (Policy Press 2016), Associate Editor at the Journal of Cultural Economy, and on the Editorial Board at Platforms and Society.

Before coming to Edinburgh, she was a lecturer at The City College of New York, where she developed and ran The City Lab@ The Center for Worker Education.

Kylie
Jarrett

University College Dublin

Kylie Jarrett is a Professor in the School of Information and Communication at University College Dublin.

She has been researching digital media since the 1990s with a focus on the political economy of the internet, including social media. Along with a range of studies of various platforms, she is author of Digital Labor (2022, Polity), and Feminism, Labour, and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife (2016, Routledge). She is also co-author of #NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (2019, MIT Press) and Google and the Culture of Search (2013, Routledge). With Ergin Bulut, Julie Chen, and Rafael Grohmann, she is co-editor of the forthcoming SAGE Handbook of Digital Labor and is editor in chief of the new journal Dialogues on Digital Society. Her current research focus is platform work and digital labour but she also has expertise in the analysis of social media and expressions of gender and sexuality in that context. She is also researching platform traders with a forthcoming co-authored book on online craft retailer Etsy in production.

Emiliano
Treré

Cardiff University

Emiliano Treré is a Reader in Data Agency and Media Ecologies and the Director of International Development at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media, and Culture. 

With over twenty years of experience, he is a leading expert and widely cited scholar in digital activism, critical data studies, algorithm studies, and digital disconnection, particularly focusing on Latin America and the Global South. Fluent in three languages, he has authored five books and published over eighty articles in top peer-reviewed journals across seven languages. Treré co-founded the Big Data from the South initiative and co-directs the Data Justice Lab, where he examines the intersections of datafication, AI, and social justice. He has secured numerous research grants and his work has received multiple awards, including the Outstanding Book Award and Honorable Mention from the ICA Interest Group on Activism, Communication, and Social Justice, as well as the MeCCSA Outstanding Achievement Award for Article of the Year.