Research Fellows 2023

Danny Spitzberg is a user researcher and sociologist based in Oakland, California. He is interested in the intersection of co-design and business ownership conversions, and is currently the research director with the Exit to Community Collective. Previously, he was Lead Researcher at Turning Basin Labs, a staffing co-op facilitating worker- and user-led studies on job quality, workforce development, and economic mobility. He also created the Ownership Model Canvas with the co-op accelerator Start.coop.

Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the Queensland University of Technology, Chief Investigator at the Digital Media Research Centre and Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Her research focuses on the interplay between user practices and platform design and governance in (re)producing structural inequality. She is co-author of a forthcoming book on WhatsApp (Polity, with Amelia Johns and Emma Baulch).

Tara B. M. Smith is an early career interdisciplinary academic with a research focus on speculative fiction, gaming, new religious movements, popular culture and ecology. Recently graduating in 2022 with a Doctor of Philosophy and a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education, Tara is a current tutor and research assistant at the University of Sydney, Australia. Tara’s thesis The Social Praxis of Science Fiction: Pedagogies of Social Change explored the power of speculative fiction to promote positive social change in society and incorporated social science methodologies and close readings of texts.

Luca Rossi is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen in the Digital Design department. Where he coordinates the Human-Centred Data Science research group, and he is part of the Networks Data and Society research group. His research connects media and communication studies with computational approaches. He explores how digital technologies and social media impact complex social processes such as participation, activism, politics and, more recently, information propagation.

Christoph Günther is a research associate at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Erfurt, funded by the DFG’s Heisenberg Programme. Previously, he headed the BMBF junior research group „Jihadism on the Internet: Images and Videos, their Appropriation and Dissemination“ at the Institute of Ethnology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. From 2016 to 2017, he was a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Ethnological Research in Halle/Saale. His research focuses on digital media and religion, lived religion, visual and material culture, iconography and iconoclasm, and religious-political movements.