My name is Stefania, and I am an Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Associate Professor of Media Innovation (II) at the University of Oslo. I am also the Principal Investigator of the DATACTIVE project, which was awarded in December 2014 a Starting Grant of the European Research Council (StG-2014_639379 DATACTIVE).
I am curious about the interplay between technologies and society, and in particular I am interested in the possibilities of self organization, emancipation, and autonomy that digital technology opens up. A political scientist by formation, I value interdisciplinary research, and feel myself at home at the intersection of a variety of fields, including critical internet studies, social movement studies, and science and technology studies. I advocate for digital rights within the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Freedom Online Coalition. You can read more about my work and talks on my website and check out my writings. In short, with my work I seek to subvert the mainstream dynamics of learning, researching and thinking, by building spaces and experimenting with processes where we can operate differently (while engaging with the mainstream to change it).
My academic ramblings in a nutshell I hold a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute, Italy (2009). Prior to joining the EUI, I studied Communication Sciences at the University of Padova, Italy. Before moving to Amsterdam, I was an Assistant Professor of Data Journalism at Tilburg University (2012-2014, where I founded the Data J Lab dedicated to ‘Big Data’ analytics) and a postdoctoral fellow at the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto (2011-2012); a visiting professor at the Department of Political Science of the Central European University, in Budapest, Hungary (2011); a visiting scholar at Media@McGill, McGill University, Montreal, Canada (2010); a research fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute (2009-2010), and at the Political and Social Sciences Department, European University Institute (2011); a lecturer at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland (2008-2010); a junior specialist at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine (2008), and a research associate at the Stanhope Center for Communications Policy Research, in London (2005-2006).