At the Data Justice Lab we’ve been keeping a record of how people are being negatively affected by the increasing use of data systems all around us. We have also been researching the important work being done to try to prevent data harms. This talk provides an overview of how contemporary data practices are leading to harm as well as the social justice work being done to try to ensure datafied futures where we can all thrive.

Speaker Profile

Joanna Redden is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies (FIMS) at Western University in London, Ontario. Her research combines interests in datafication, politics, governance and social justice. She is co-director of the Data Justice Lab. She is currently working on projects that involve: a) mapping and analyzing the social and political implications of increasing government uses of predictive and automated data systems, b) learning from data harms and those trying to redress these harms and c) working toward greater civic participation in our datafied societies.

She is co-author of Data Justice (Sage, 2022), the author of The Mediation of Poverty: The News, New Media and Politics (Lexington, 2014) and co-editor of Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data (Bloomsbury, 2015). She has published articles in academic journals such as Big Data & Society and popular sites like Scientific American. She has contributed chapters to various edited collections. Her research has been funded by the Open Society Foundations, Carnegie UK Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.