Niels ten Oever – niels@criticalinfralab.net – co-principal investigator – geopolitics lead
Niels is a postdoctoral researcher with the ‘Making the hidden visible: Co-designing for public values in standards-making and governance’-project at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. Next to that, he is a research fellow with the Centre for Internet and Human Rights at the European University Viadrina, non-resident fellow with the Center for Democracy and Technology, affiliated faculty with the Digital Democracy Institute at the Simon Fraser University, and an associated scholar with the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. He also holds the position of Vice-Chair for the Global Internet Governance Academic Network. His research focuses on how norms, such as human rights, get inscribed, resisted, and subverted in the Internet infrastructure through its transnational governance.
Niels tries to understand how invisible infrastructures provide a socio-technical ordering to information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power, and possibilities.
Peter ‘Maxigas’ Dunajcsik – maxigas@criticalinfralab.net – co-principal investigator – standards lead
Maxigas is Senior Lecturer in Media & Culture at the Media Department of the University of Amsterdam. He interested in hacker culture, cybernetic ideologies, infrastructural imaginaries, and the materiality of the digital. He uses media ethnography and digital methods to answer philosophical questions about contemporary social conflicts. With a thoroughly interdisciplinary background in the social sciences and humanities, a decade long industry experience in IT, and a history of media activist practice, he brings a theoretically sophisticated, technologically grounded, politically savvy perspective to debates on media and culture. His papers have been published in leading journals in Science and Technology Studies as well as Media Studies, from the Social Studies in Science, through the Journal of Peer Production, to most recently in the Internet Policy Review.
Fieke Jansen – fieke@criticalinfralab.net – co-principal investigator – environment lead
Fieke is a postdoc researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Previously she was a postdoc at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University, where she researched the relationship between datafication on labour in the Netherlands. In her PhD she looked at the institutional and societal implications of data-driven risk scoring and biometric recognition in Brussels, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK. Fieke is a former Mozilla and Green Web Foundation fellow where she explored ways to frame the climate crisis as a core digital rights issue. Prior to starting her PhD Fieke worked for Hivos where she set up the Digital Defenders Partnership and at Tactical Tech where she lead the politics of data program.
Fieke research interest is to understand how the material impact of expending infrastructures are shaping the management, distribution, and depletion of natural resources.
Szilvia Mondel – szilvia@criticalinfralab.net – project manager
Szilvia is the project manager of the critical infrastructure lab. She has extensive experience with managing educational and institutional projects at the University of Amsterdam. Her organizational, administrative, and logistical skills are indispensable to running the critical infrastructure lab. She also loves windsurfing and painting.