Founders

Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and from 2017 has been a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He jointly led, with Clemencia Rodriguez, the chapter on media and communications in the 22 chapter report of the International Panel on Social Progress published in 2018: www.ipsp.org. He is the author or editor of fifteen books including The Costs of Connection (2019, with Ulises A. Mejias, Stanford University Press),The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters (Sage 2010). His latest books are Media: Why It Matters (Polity: October 2019), and Media Voice Space and Power (Routledge 2020).

Paola Ricaurte is associate professor in the Department of Media and Digital Culture at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City and digital rights activist. She is Faculty Associate, and previously a fellow, at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University (2018-2019) and was an Edmundo O'Gorman fellow in the Institute for Latin American Studies, Columbia University (2018). Her work focuses on the critical study of digital technologies. Her publications include Data Epistemologies, The Coloniality of Power, and Resistance (2019), Youth and Digital Culture: Critical Approaches from Latin America (2018), Pedagogies for the Open Knowledge Society (2016), Challenges to collective action in the post-Snowden era: visions from Latin America (2015), Control societies: techno-surveillance and civic resistance in Mexico (2014), and the Freedom on the Net report for Mexico (2017) among others.

Ulises Ali Mejías is Professor of Communication Studies and director of the Institute for Global Engagement at the State University of New York, College at Oswego. He is a media scholar whose work encompasses critical internet studies, network theory and science, philosophy and sociology of technology, and political economy of digital media. He is the author of The Costs of Connection (2019, with Nick Couldry, Stanford University Press), Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and various articles including ‘Disinformation and the Media: The case of Russia and Ukraine’ in Media, Culture and Society (2017, with N. Vokuev), and ‘Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond’ in Fibreculture (2012).