Prospective Graduate Students / Postdocs
This faculty member is currently not actively recruiting graduate students or Postdoctoral Fellows, but might consider co-supervision together with another faculty member.
This faculty member is currently not actively recruiting graduate students or Postdoctoral Fellows, but might consider co-supervision together with another faculty member.
I am so fortunate to have a pair of supportive and caring supervisors. @NJLachowsky and @ethicalquandary. They do an amazing job of pushing me to be more reflective and engaged with what it means to engage with community #greatsupervisor #ubc
Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.
Nation states increasingly manage peoples’ movements across borders using data analytics, automated systems, and algorithmic technologies. Once individuals begin living in a new country, governments continue to collect, analyze, and share data about their immigration and settlement process. In Canada, newcomers are often asked for data about their personal experiences and identity in order to receive access to services from community-based organizations and government agencies. Experimental uses of data can have harmful effects because of mistakes, misrepresentations, and misunderstandings which can jeopardize fundamental human rights and international responsibilities to care for migrants. Informed by previous work on the harms of datafication, this inquiry focuses on questions of care. In particular, what are current information practices and alternative visions of how newcomers’ data should be cared for ethically? The research reported here aims to learn from a diversity of groups’ ethical perspectives and experiences of stewarding immigration data as they seek to respect newcomers’ capabilities and wellbeing.Methods involved 14 semi-structured interviews with individuals in groups supporting immigration and settlement, for which conversations were hosted over 10 months during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interviewees include settlement service providers, migrant justice activists, immigration researchers, government staff, and designers of digital systems and services oriented towards newcomers. The dissertation examines participants’ stories of “data care” and recurring themes which characterize their labour. Interviewees provide accounts of conflict, confusion, compromise, and, at times, coordination with their peers in similar and different groups. Groups linked by their labour with data are therefore understood as interdependent, because their information practices influence one another and newcomers. Findings can be employed by governmental and non-governmental actors to identify links and tensions in their labour with newcomer communities’ data. Contributions offer points of discussion and decision making for organizing the stewardship of communities’ data in support of activities such as advocacy for migrant justice, immigration research, policymaking, service provision, and the design of information technologies. The inquiry conceptualizes groups supporting newcomers as part of an interconnected web, who by understanding one another’s ethical perspectives and practices may coordinate and strengthen their acts of care.
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Records held in national and institutional archives can serve as instruments of accountability and transparency for government actions (or inaction) and aid in constructing social memory. As digital technologies advance, records that were traditionally analogue are increasingly generated within networked digital platforms. In efforts contribute to archival and records theory on social media and accountability, this dissertation investigates emergent practices in the Government of Canada’s (GC) early use of social media, (2013–2014), when agencies and public servants were in the nascent stages of adoption. This study undertakes a qualitative examination of two main areas of the GC’s social media use: social media and recordkeeping practices and their implications for records generation and retention, and policy instruments and frameworks regarding the role of information management and recordkeeping in its social media use and outputs. Empirical data gathered included 28 interview participants, 34 legislative and policy instruments, online and offline observations, and 35 documentary sources, which were analyzed using a practice lens—introducing the utility of a practice lens for archival research. The main objectives of the study were to gain an understanding of the relationships between social media practices, policy, and information management and recordkeeping practices in the GC during an early phase of social media adoption and to contribute to the archival and records theory discourse surrounding shifting social media and recordkeeping practices and the implications for records as instruments of accountability.Findings suggest that emerging social media practices at that time put a strain on existing government frameworks, particularly with regard to retaining, collecting, and preserving its own records and records under its collections mandate. Despite implementing social media, findings also indicate that GC social media adoption and use operated in a bureaucratic environment that struggled to effectively adopt the ethos of these platforms (e.g. horizontal collaborations, ease of information access, etc.). The research surfaced constraints in policy development: policies intended to support increased collaboration were challenged by a hierarchical decision-making model. Moving forward, this research suggests an agile approach to policy development and an exploration of global treaty approaches in exploration of social media platform governance models.
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