Talks

2024

Gov-tech: from digital public goods to data assets.” EASST-4S 2024. July 16-19.

Design Justice AI Institute, University of Pretoria, South Africa. July 1-13.

ICA Blue Sky Workshop on Communication & the Future of Cities. International Communication Association Annual Meeting. June 20-24.

“Gov-Tech: The Moral Economy of Capturing Public Information.” International Communication Association Annual Meeting. June 20-24.

“Ethnographies of the Datafied State.” The Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group. April 12.

“Urban Captures in the Data-Driven City.” Edgelands Symposium: Bridging the Gap Between Technology, Security, and the Urban Social Contract. Medellín, Colombia, February 22-23.

2023

“Capturing Data in the Smart City.” Oregon Surveillance Studies Workshop. October 13-14.

“Google Urbanism 2010-2020: From Infrastructural Control to Growing Bit by Bit.” Sciences Po’s Digital Cities Chair International Conference. July 10.

“Searching for Failures in the Smart City.” STS Italia Conference, June 28-30.

“Corporate Capture in the Data-Driven City” Reimagining Urban Communication Post-conference, International Communication Association Annual Meeting. May 30.

“Extracting Value in the Data-Driven City” Data (Re)Makes the World, Yale University. March 31-April 1.

“How to Do an Ethnography of a Dashboard?” Mixed Realities: Ethnographic Approaches to the Virtual, Yale University. February 23-24.

2022

“Pandemic Dashboards: How Cities Craft Knowledge of Covid-19.” Quo vadis Digital Democracy? Strengthening and Preserving Democracy in the Digital Age, University of Bonn, Germany. September 30. [Link]

“The Techno-Politics of COVID-19 Dashboards in U.S. Cities.” Infrastructures and Interfaces of Publics Workshop, Aarhus University. June 8. [Link]

“The Techno-Politics of COVID-19 Data in U.S. Cities.” and “Civic Tech Goes to Market.” International Communication Association Annual Meeting. May 26-30.

“Making up the Predictable Border.” (with Alphoncina Lyamuya). Digital Technologies and Migration Regimes Workshop, University of Oxford, May 25.

“How Cities Craft Knowledge during a Pandemic.” Center for Advanced Internet Studies Colloquium. April 27.

“Making up the Predictable Border.” (with Alphoncina Lyamuya). STS-MIGTEC circle. March 31. [Link]

“Soft-Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st-Century Global Order.” (with Victoria de Grazia, Jack Snyder, Fernando Santomauro, Dilek Barlas, Zhongying Pang) Columbia Global Centers Rio de Janeiro. March 25. [Link]

“The Art of Quantifying the Smart City.” The Smartification of Everything Symposium. March 10-11.

“Civic Tech Goes to Market.” Department of Communication and Media Research Speaker Series. University of Zurich. March 7.

“The Art of Quantifying the Smart City.” Zube Lecture Series, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Feburary 24. [Link]

“Making up the Predictable Border: A Case Study of Project Jetson” (with Alphoncina Lyamuya). STS-MIGTEC Paper Workshop. February 15-17.

2021

Soft-Power Internationalism: Rethinking Communication and Empires in the 21st Century (with Victoria de Grazia, Maria Repnikova, Paula Chakravartty, and Marwan Kraidy). University of Massachusetts Amherst. November 1.

Soft Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st-Century Global Order Book Launch (with Victoria de Grazia, Oliver Stuenkel, Stephen Wertheim, Anastas Vangeli, Pierre Vimont, moderated by Adam Tooze) Columbia University. October 19. [Link]

“Making up the Predictable Border: A Case Study of Project Jetson.” (with Alphoncina Lyamuya). Critical Borders: Radical (Re)visions of AI, University of Cambridge. October 19-20. [Link]

“The Art of Quantifying the City.” and “Localizing a Pandemic: COVID-19 Data Dashboards in U.S. Cities.” Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting. October 6-9, Toronto, Canada.

CHI Salon: A Short History of Soft Power (with Victoria de Grazia & Oliver Stuenkel). The Center for Humanistic Inquiry (CHI), Amherst College. September 29. [Link]

“Localizing a Pandemic: COVID-19 Data Dashboards in U.S. Cities.” American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. August 6-10.

“Algorithmic Accountability in the City.” Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG), Algorithms, Law, and Policy Working Group. June 10.

“A Typology of Algorithmic Accountability in the City.” and “The Politics of Covid-19 Data in U.S. Cities.” International Communication Association Annual Meeting. May 27-31.

College of Information and Computer Science Interdisciplinary Conversation on Ethics, UMass Amherst, April 16.

“Localizing a Pandemic: A Comparative Review of COVID-19 Data Dashboards in U.S. Cities.” Trust and Doubt in Public-Sector Data Infrastructures Academic Workshop, Data & Society. March 25.

“The City as Data Machine: Local Governance in the Age of Big Data.” Civic Media Insights, Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, MIT. February 26.

2020

“Taking Data Into Account.” [Presenter and open panel organizer] Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting. August 18-21.

“Enduring Inequalities in the Digital City.” American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. August 8-11. [Virtual meeting due to Covid-19] [Link]

What – the field? (WTF): Ethnography in the Time of COVID. May 27. UMass Amherst. [Link]

“Chasing Smartness: Researching the City through Technological Institutions.” International Communication Association Annual Meeting. May 21-25. [Virtual meeting due to Covid-19] [Link]

2019

“Get Smart: How Cities Become Data-Driven.” UMass Amherst Four @Four Speaker Series, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, December 11, Amherst. [Link]

“Smartness as Deliberate Ignorance.” and “Tweeting Economics: Co-Constructing Expertise on Social Media.” American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. August 10-13. New York City, NY.

“Becoming Data-Driven: The Practice of Prediction in Local Governments,” Scraping the Demos: Political Epistemologies of Big Data, Weizenbaum Institute-Quantification and Social Regulation. July 8-9. Berlin, Germany. [Link]

“Becoming Data-Driven: Dashboards and Data Analytics in City Hall.” Algorithms on the Shop Floor: Data-Driven Technologies in Organizational Context Academic Workshop, Data & Society. June 14. New York City, NY. [Link]

“(Dis)Connecting the Smart City.” and “De-Provincializing Soft Power: A Comparative-Critical History, 1990-2015.” International Communication Association Annual Meeting. May 24-28. Washington, DC.

2018

“The City as Data Machine.” The Herrenhausen Conference on Transparency and Society: Between Promise and Peril.” June 12-14, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, Germany.

“Civic Entrepreneurialism in the Age of Smart Cities.” International Communication Association Annual Meeting. May 26-30, Prague, Czech Republic.

“Circulating (Il)Liberalism on the Internet.” Global Perspectives on Populism and the Media, International Communication Association Pre-Conference. May 23-24, Budapest, Hungary.

2017

“The Rise of Civic Entrepreneurialism.” The Information Society Project Lunch Speaker Series, Yale Law School. September 14, New Haven, Connecticut.

“Civicness in the Smart City: Solutions in Search of Problems.” Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting. August 30-September 2, Boston, Massachusetts. [Link]

“The City as Data Machine.” Intelligent Communities Roundtable. Social Science Research Council. June 16, New York City.

“Google Fiber: We Will Build it If They Come” and “Civicness in the Smart City: Solutions in Search of Problems.” International Communication Association Annual Meeting. May 25-29, San Diego, California.

2016

“Solutions in Search of Problems: Inventing the Smart City.” midweSTS Graduate Workshop. September 16-17, Chicago, Illinois.

“Smart Cities and Blockchains: New Techno-Utopian Dreams or Nightmares.” The Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) Conference XI, July 22-24, New York City. [Link]

“How Urban Innovators Make Smart Cities.” Global Cities, Local Knowledge: The Power of Networks, Fudan University. June 6-7, Shanghai, China.

2015

“Urban Experiments in the Gigabit City.” Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting. November 11-14, Denver, Colorado.

“Growth and Governance in the Gigabit City.” Experimenting with Technologies Conference. August 20-22, Delft, Netherlands.