Visiting Fellowships
Every year, DISC welcomes senior and junior visiting researchers and PhD students who would like to spend some time at Manchester Metropolitan University and collaborate with our members. In 2024, we launched a funded Visiting Fellows scheme, to support short visits by international researchers.
2025-2026 Fellows
Dr Avi Boukli
Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology, University of Southampton
Avi Boukli is Associate Professor of Criminology and a socio-legal scholar specialising in zemiology, international criminal law, and social and legal inequalities. Their work examines issues including AI-driven inequalities, border and colonial harms, gendered violence, hate crime against queer communities, environmental harm, and human trafficking. Avi is the author of Zemiology and Human Trafficking (Routledge, 2024), co-editor of Zemiology: Reconnecting Crime and Harm (Palgrave, 2018), and has published in leading journals, including Criminology & Criminal Justice and Critical Criminology.
Prof Roger Canals Vilageliu
Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona
Roger Canals Vilageliu is a Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona (UB). He is currently the PI of the ERC-Consolidator project ‘Visual Trust. Reliability, accountability, and forgery in scientific, religious and social images’ (2021-2026). Specialist in Visual Anthropology, he is the author of many articles as well as of the books including A Goddess in Motion (2017) and The Image that Never Ends. A Journey through Visual Anthropology (forthcoming). As a filmmaker, he has made several internationally awarded films like “A Goddess in Motion” (2016) and “Chasing Shadows” (2019). In 2016, he received the Fejos Fellowship for Ethnographic Film from the Wenner-Gren Foundation of New York.
Prof Florence M. Chee
School of Communication, Loyola University Chicago
Florence Chee is Associate Professor of Digital Communication in the School of Communication, Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Computer Science, and Director of the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy (CDEP) at Loyola University Chicago. Internationally and nationally sought out as a speaker, writer, and advisor, her sociotechnical interventions inform and influence decisions made in design, development, and policy arenas. This year, she has been named to the Fulbright Specialist Roster for 2025-2028 and has recently focused on the US and Swiss game industries while serving on grant funded work in Switzerland. Florence Chee is founding director of the Social & Interactive Media Lab (SIMLab) based in Chicago, USA.
2024-2025 Fellows
Dr Nataliia Laba
Communication and Information Studies, University of Groningen
Nataliia Laba is an Assistant Professor in Digital and Multimodal Communication / Humane AI at University of Groningen. Her research focuses on multimodal generative artificial intelligence and works at the intersection of critical data studies, discourse studies, and techno-ethics. Her current research projects address human-machine agency and a range of representational issues in the context of visual generative media adoption and use. These include how gender bias becomes normalized through prompting practices, the attitudinal stance-taking of non-human agents in AI-generated images of war, the effects of prompt modifiers on AI video generation, and the impact of visual generative media on the creative economy, professional designers, and artists. Nataliia is particularly interested in discourse structure relations between tech companies, designers, critics, and users as a way of engagement with observable techno-cultural practices and activities considered essential for good AI stewardship.
Dr Katherine Clare Mackinnon
Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen
Katie Mackinnon is a postdoc on the research project Data Loss: The Politics of Disappearance, Destruction and Dispossession in Digital Societies (DALOSS) (PI: Nanna Bonde Thylstrup). She researches web archives, internet histories, and social media platforms, and engages with critical feminist ethics of care methodologies for web archival research while exploring social, infrastructural, and policy issues of the internet. Katie’s PhD is from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. Her dissertation, Databound: Histories of Growing up on the World Wide Web, looks to the Canadian context to examine digital traces and data afterlives of young people’s online participation in the 1990s-2000s. Her work engages with ageing web materials and argues that data is inextricably attached to people, both in the ways that it represents them and in the ways that they desire and deserve meaningful control over it.
Interested in visiting DISC?
Please get in touch with Adi Kuntsman or Daniel Joseph.