Visiting Fellowships

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.