People
Lisa Parks
Director
Lisa Parks is a Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies at UCSB and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. She is a media scholar whose research focuses on satellite technologies and global media cultures; critical studies of media infrastructures; environmental media; and media, militarization and surveillance.
Mette Simonsen Abildgaard
Visiting Scholar
Mette is associate professor of Arctic Technology Studies at Aalborg University in Copenhagen. Her current research focuses on the way telecommunication infrastructures intersect with everyday life in Arctic and Nordic countries. She is at the GMTaC lab in spring 2024.
Jennifer Holt
Project Head for WOW
Jennifer Holt is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UCSB. Her current research focuses on cloud policy, Big Tech, media ownership, and infrastructure. Holt is the author of Empires of Entertainment and co-editor of Media Industries, Connected Viewing & Distribution Revolution. She heads the Who Owns What (WOW) project.
Nat Cheyette
Former WOW Project Coordinator
Nat Cheyette holds a BA in Film and Media Studies from UCSB, and has been primarily focused on issues of copyright and global access to information and culture. They worked on the Who Owns What (WOW) project in 2023.
Elijah Frankle
Former Undergraduate Research Assistant
Elijah is a Computing major and Media Arts/Theatre Design double minor developing creative data visualization for the Who Own What project. His work as an artist, designer, and coder, focuses on the intersection of art and technology.
Juan Garnica Rivera
Former Undergraduate Research Assistant
Juan is a double major in Film and Media Studies and Chicana/o/x Studies with a minor in Educational Studies at UCSB. His research interests include use and appropriation of media within Latinx, Indigenous, and migrant communities. He works on the Who Owns What (WOW) project.
Tara Plath
Graduate Research Assistant
Tara Plath is a doctoral student in the Film and Media Studies Department. Her research interests include surveillance, satellite, and mapping technologies and their uses in border environments. She works on the Satellite Coast project.
Pujita Guha
Affiliate Graduate Student
Pujita Guha is a Ph.D. student in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her research interests are at the intersection of environment and media, forests and ecologies of South and Southeast Asia with a focus on military and guerilla practices, anthropogenic urban forests, animism and contemporary moving image art of the region.
Ranna Zahabi
Former Undergraduate Research Assistant
Ranna Zahabi is a 4th year undergraduate student in the History of Public Policy & Law department with research interests in the intersection of science policy, data privacy, and space and maritime commercialization. She worked on the satellite coast project in 2023.
Iago Bojczuk
Research Affiliate
Iago Bojczuk is a media and information studies researcher from Brazil. He earned his masters at MIT in 2020, and his thesis focused on the history of satellite-based remote learning projects in rural Brazil. He served as an International Telecommunication Union fellow in 2020, and is now a doctoral student at Cambridge University.
Sander De Ridder
Research Affiliate
Sander De Ridder (PhD, Ghent University) is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer cultural media studies at Ghent University, Belgium. His research focuses on digital media, everyday life, the self and identity. He has published widely on digital youth cultures, intimacy and sexuality. He is a co-editor of Media Backends.
Temitayo Ogunbiyi
Affiliate Artist
Temitayo Ogunbiyi is a multimedia artist based in Lagos, Nigeria. A 2020/21 Digital Earth Fellow, supported by the Hivos Foundation, her current artwork explores practices of surveillance and issues of play. She is a member of the Data Centered Collective. For more information: https://www.temitayo.com/
Ramesh Srinivasan
Research Affiliate
Ramesh Srinivasan studies the relationship between technology, politics, and societies across the world. He is a faculty member at UCLA in the Information Studies and Design|Media Arts departments.
Former Research Assistants at UCSB
Fiona Andersons
Former Undergraduate Research Assistant
Fiona Andersons is Film and Media Studies and Global Studies double major at UCSB, with interests in critical studies of surveillance capitalism, digital media infrastructures, media globalization, and cognitive media effects. She worked on the Who Owns What (WOW) project.
Seth Ragonese
Former Undergraduate Research Assistant
Seth Ragonese is a Film and Media Studies major at UCSB, with interests in media industries and political economy. He is a mental health advocate, proud 99.9%er, respector of plants, animals, and our one livable planet. He worked on WOW.
Julia Velkova
Research Affiliate
Julia Velkova is a media scholar and an Associate Professor in Technology and Social Change at Linköping University in Sweden. Her research explores the material and temporal politics of digital media infrastructures in the context of data centres and energy. She is a co-editor of Media Backends.
Shaoni C. White
Former Research Assistant
Shaoni C. White holds a BA in English Literature and Linguistics from Swarthmore College. Their academic interests lie at the intersection of postcolonial studies, queer studies, and speculative media. They are now enrolled in a PhD program at UC Davis.
Andrew Hansen
Former Undergraduate Research Assistant
Andrew Hansen is a double major in Film and Media Studies and Writing & Literature at UCSB, with interests in media ownership, digital media, and archival research. He is currently working on Who Owns What (WOW).
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
Research Affiliate
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of Critical Media Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the creator and founder of the Global Media Cultures Podcast, and has published his research widely in several academic journals. He is currently working on a book entitled, Border Tunnels: At the Limits of Transnational Media.
Assatu Wisseh
Former Graduate Research Assistant
Assatu Wisseh is a PhD student in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She approaches her research foci on Black women cultural producers, the politics of representation, Liberian-American popular culture, and media infrastructures through the lenses of Black feminisms and critical race theory. She worked on the Network Sovereignty Project.
Tinghao Zhou
Former Graduate Research Assistant
Tinghao Zhou is a Ph.D. student in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His research interests include environmental media, zoological media studies, and electricity/lighting infrastructure; architecture, urbanism, and design theory. He helped set up the lab at UCSB.
Former Research Assistants at MIT
Diego Cerna Aragon
Former Research Assistant
Diego Cerna Aragon is a first-year graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. His research interests include discourse analysis, expert knowledge, digital media, and online interactions.
Matt Graydon
Former Research Assistant
Matt Graydon is an alumnus of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. His past work examined the evolution and impact of influence operations, with a focus on Russia. He now works at Meta.
Meng Liang
Former Visiting Graduate Student
Meng Liang is a visiting graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and a Ph.D. candidate at University College London (UCL). Her research focuses on mobile Internet and telecommunication history in China.
Gabriel Pereira
Former Visiting Graduate Student
Gabriel Pereira was a visiting graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and a Ph.D. fellow at Aarhus University (Denmark). His research focuses on critical studies of data infrastructures.
Han Su
Former Research Assistant
Han Su is a second-year graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He has a background in human-computer interaction and NLP. His current research focuses on the quantification of cultural capital, and the global streaming project.
Zahra Thabet
Former Research Assistant
Zahra is a UROP in GMTaC for the fall semester. She is a sophomore at Wellesley College where she majors in economics with an intended double major in sociology. Her research interests span the intersecting topics of law, privacy, and how institutions make and enact policy.
Rachel Thompson
Former Research Assistant
Rachel Thompson is an alumna of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her research interrogates the ethics of American incarceration media. She then earned a law degree at UC Berkeley Law School.
Kelly Wagman
Former Research Assistant
Kelly Wagman is a first-year graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her research interests include feminist technoscience, human-machine communication, and design. She is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Chicago
Vicky Zeamer
Former Research Assistant
Vicky Zeamer graduated from the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT in 2018. Her research explored how computing and digital media are changing the ways users experience food. She is now employed at Ideo in San Francisco.
Alan Zhang
Former Affiliate Student
Alan Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Work and Organization Studies at MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on visual technologies in workplace organizations.