Jennifer Pybus is a globally recognized scholar whose interdisciplinary research intersects digital and algorithmic cultures and explores the capture and processing of personal data. Her work focuses on the political economy of social media platforms, display ad economies, and the rise of third parties embedded in the mobile ecosystem which are facilitating algorithmic profiling, monetisation, polarization and bias. Her research contributes to an emerging field, mapping out datafication, a process that is rendering our social, cultural and political lives into productive data for machine learning and algorithmic decision-making. Pybus has cultivated strong European links with public organizations and will use her chair to engage Canadians with innovative tools, resources and pedagogy for increasing critical data literacy and democratic debate about artificial intelligence.

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Jennifer Pybus is a globally recognized scholar whose interdisciplinary research intersects digital and algorithmic cultures and explores the capture and processing of personal data. Her work focuses on the political economy of social media platforms, display ad economies, and the rise of third parties embedded in the mobile ecosystem which are facilitating algorithmic profiling, monetisation, polarization and bias. Her research contributes to an emerging field, mapping out datafication, a process that is rendering our social, cultural and political lives into productive data for machine learning and algorithmic decision-making. Pybus has cultivated strong European links with public organizations and will use her chair to engage Canadians with innovative tools, resources and pedagogy for increasing critical data literacy and democratic debate about artificial intelligence.

Dr. Jennifer Pybus completed her PhD at McMaster University in English and Cultural Studies 2013. She has gone on to become a globally recognised scholar with a reputation for doing interdisciplinary research, which focuses on digital and algorithmic cultures in relation to the capture and processing of personal data. Dr. Pybus began looking at these questions during her MA and Phd wherein her work examined the subjectivization of young people in relation social media platforms. Her earlier work examined the contradictions between engaging in networked sociality and the growing source of economic value this behaviour was coming to represent. Her research has been tracking how mediated and cultural practices get rendered into actionable value since 2006, culminating in influential and widely cited publications such as Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0: MySpace and Social Networks, later updated to Facebook and Social Networks which she co-wrote with Mark Coté; Accumulating Affect: Social Networks and their Archives of Feelings; and Social Networks and cultural workers; Towards an Archive of the Prosumer.

Before joining York, Pybus worked at in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London as a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society. There she continued to focus on the political economy of social media platforms by extending her research on young people and those assemblages built around the capture of their data. This more recent work examined the rise of third-party infrastructures embedded in the mobile ecosystem, which are facilitating algorithmic profiling, monetisation, polarization and bias. Her research contributes to an emerging field, mapping out datafication, a process that is rendering our social, cultural and political lives into actionable data for machine learning and algorithmic decision-making.

Dr. Pybus made a notable contribution beginning with her work on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant: Our Data Ourselves (2013-2015), an investigation into datafication flows within the mobile ecosystem and the possibilities that arise when young people are given back the data they are normally structurally precluded from accessing. This in part focused on the creation of digital tools to enable the more agentic and data literate citizens. A number of publications emerged from this project, including an article in Big Data and Society and Digital Culture and Society and special issue on the Politics of Big Data that she co-edited in 2015. In 2018, Dr. Pybus strengthened her academic standing by securing her own AHRC Impact Award: ‘Zones of Data Translation,’ by partnering with a Berlin-based non-profit organisation, Tactical Tech. The aim was to mobilise knowledge and build capacity outside the university with community stakeholder groups through a series of co-designed workshops and tools that opened up the mobile ecosystem so that non-expert users could gain a greater understanding of how apps gather personal data.

The work has been very well-received internationally at universities in the UK, Paris, Brussels, Italy, Germany, China and Canada. She has been asked to speak about her research before the European Parliament, participate with different UK based foundations; and collaborated with workshops around algorithmic accountability. Her research has also prominently featured at OrgCon, the largest global digital rights conference and at Tactical Tech’s Glass Room installation in San Francisco in 2019. Publications emerging from this project include two co-written articles: The Material Conditions of Platforms: Monopolization Through Decentralisation (2020) with Tobias Blanke and Did you give permission? Datafication in the Mobile Ecosystem with Mark Coté (2021).

Dr. Pybus is excited to continue on with her research at York University as a new Canada Research Chair in Data, Democracy and AI. She will continue to cultivate strong North American and European links by using her chair to engage Canadians with innovative tools, resources and participatory research for increasing critical data literacy and democratic debate about artificial intelligence.

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