Project Leader:

Anita Say Chan is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research, teaching, and community service interests include globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the “periphery”, science and technology studies in global contexts, and hybrid pedagogies in building digital literacies. She received her PhD in 2008 from the MIT Doctoral Program in History; Anthropology; and Science, Technology, and Society. Her first book the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism was released by MIT Press in 2014. Her research has been awarded support from the Center for the Study of Law & Culture at Columbia University’s School of Law and the National Science Foundation, and she has held postdoctoral fellowships at The CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization & Social Change, and at Stanford University’s Introduction to Humanities Program. She is a Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellow with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Email: achan@illinois.edu

Project Fellows:

• Jorge Rojas-Alvarez is a Graduate Student in the Ph. D. program at the Institute of Communications Research in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His background is Computer Science and History of Technology. Have taken part in the design of public history exercises in national libraries in Colombia within topics of media memory of rural literacy programs based on a radio broadcast. In these exercises of public history, the libraries emerge as spaces of dialogue between historical documental archives and memories of users. My main pursuit is to find ways and places for co-construction of collective memory where the inquiry of the past empower communities to imagine diverse futures. Email: jorger3@illinois.edu
• Interdisciplinary scholar and classical musician Adrian Wong focuses on hacking and data gathering as forms of resource extraction, researching what the directionalities of flow of contested information reveal about geopolitical power dynamics. A Fiddler Innovation Student Research Fellow with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, he will be starting his PhD at the Institute of Communications Research this Fall. Adrian draws on semiotics, discourse analysis and ethnography to explore how transnational agents undermine and reconfigure cultural and legal understandings of intellectual property and the control of information as a resource. Intimately engaged in the practice of classical music, Adrian performed around Los Angeles with Midori Goto’s community outreach quartet while studying at the University of Southern California as a Presidential Scholar, and has collaborated with orchestras across the United States, Spain and France. Adrian learned meditation from his father–who had been a Buddhist monk for ten years — and weaves elements of mindfulness and concentration practice into his life and work. In his free time, he daydreams about hiking high mountain passes, and offers lessons in math and Kundalini Yoga. Email: adrianw3@illinois.edu

• Justin Tu is an alumni of Illinois and 2019 Capitol Scholar.

  He has been working on Chinese Open Source Intelligence analysis, currently at AECOM as a U.S. Department of State intern. Previously, he worked in an undergraduate research team classifying partisan misinformation behavior on Twitter on Senate elections during the 2018 U.S. Midterm Elections, and presented at the 2019 MPSA Conference. Outside of work, Justin enjoys traveling, cooking, and partaking in discussions and stories! He is also a proud alum of the Varsity Men’s Glee Club. Brothers, sing on!