For best experience please turn on javascript and use a modern browser!
You are using a browser that is no longer supported by Microsoft. Please upgrade your browser. The site may not present itself correctly if you continue browsing.
uva.nl
Global Digital Cultures GDC

Global Cultural Interference: The Case of 5G Data Infrastructures

Imagining and Experiencing Digital Urban Worlds 

The overall objective of the proposed project is to explore how 5G networks are represented, imagined, and entangled with significant socio-economic and political implications. We propose to research cultural interference in infrastructural imaginaries of 5G networks between China and Europe. Specifically, we are interested in how such infrastructural imaginaries play a key role (1) in the construction of data infrastructures that (2) reconfigure market relations and (3) motivate new modes of governance. The proposed project brings together results and methodologies from research lines that the applicants pursue through their specialisation in data science practice and media ethnography.

Peter (Maxigas) Dunajcsik is Senior Lecturer in Media & Culture at the Media Department of the University of Amsterdam. He interested in hacker culture, cybernetic ideologies, infrastructural imaginaries, and the materiality of the digital. He uses media ethnography and digital methods to answer philosophical questions about contemporary social conflicts. With a thoroughly interdisciplinary background in the social sciences and humanities, a decade long industry experience in IT, and a history of media activist practice, he brings a theoretically sophisticated, technologically grounded, politically savvy perspective to debates on media and culture. His papers have been published in leading journals in Science and Technology Studies as well as Media Studies, from the Social Studies in Science, through the Journal of Peer Production, to most recently in the Internet Policy Review.

Paul Groth is Professor of Algorithmic Data Science at the University of Amsterdam where he leads the Intelligent Data Engineering Lab (INDElab). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southampton (2007) and has done research at the University of Southern California, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Elsevier Labs. Paul is scientific director of the UvA’s Data Science Center. Additionally, he is co-scientific director of two Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI) labs: The AI for Retail (AIR) Lab - a collaboration between UvA and Ahold Delhaize; and the Discovery Lab - a collaboration between Elsevier, the University of Amsterdam and VU University Amsterdam. His research focuses on intelligent systems for dealing with large amounts of diverse contextualized data.This includes research in data provenance and data integration at scale.   

Niels ten Oever is a postdoctoral researcher with the ‘Making the hidden visible: Co-designing for public values in standards-making and governance’-project at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. He is also a research fellow with the Centre for Internet and Human Rights at the European University Viadrina and an associated scholar with the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. His research focuses on how norms, such as human rights, get inscribed, resisted, and subverted in the Internet infrastructure through its transnational governance. Niels tries to understand how invisible infrastructures provide a socio-technical ordering to information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power, and possibilities.   

Jeroen Matthijs de Vos (MA) is internet and market researcher specialized in both online and offline research. He has a background in media studies & cultural anthropology and is currently working on impact driven projects both inside and outside University walls.