University of Ottawa

Kathleen Selkirk is a JD student in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. She received her Bachelors degree with honours in Criminology from the University of Ottawa in 2010. Prior to attending law school, Kathleen lived in the Arctic community of Inuvik, Northwest Territories, where she worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Northern National Event as the Film, Video and Exhibitions Coordinator. Kathleen is passionate about institutional transparency, privacy rights, and access to justice. She is looking forward to articling in criminal defense with Edelson D’Angelo Friedman in Ottawa upon completion of her law degree in June 2017.

Roderick is an MA student in Criminology and Women's Studies at the University of Ottawa. His research concerns the experiences of women who have been victimized by harassment on social media. Through his research and research assistantship positions, he has investigated trolling, flaming, hate speech, sexting, cyberbullying, surveillance, data privacy and social media. He has primarily supported the eQuality project with literature reviews and coding. His primary hobbies are hockey and Microsoft Excel.

Robert Porter recently graduated from the University of York (UK) with an M.A. in Public history, which explored both private and public participation in cultural production and representation. He has since focused his research and writing on cultural, historical, and technological issues facing society. He supports his passions of photography and cultural history through work in proposal writing, communications policy with the eQuality Project, and research with Big Data Surveillance - focusing on the ways in which Big Data and the use of algorithms leads to discrimination of vulnerable individuals and groups.

Valerie Steeves, B.A., J.D., Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa.  Her main area of research is in human rights and technology issues. Professor Steeves has written and spoken extensively on online issues, and has worked with a number of federal departments, including Industry Canada, Health Canada, Heritage Canada, the Department of Justice and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, on online policy.  She is also a frequent intervener before parliamentary committees, and has worked with a number of policy groups, including the International Council on Human Rights Policy (Geneva, Switzerland), the House of Lords Constitution Committee on The Impact of Surveillance and Data Collection upon the Privacy of Citizens and their Relationship with the State (United Kingdom), and the Children’s Online Privacy Working Group of the Canadian Privacy and Information Commissioners and Youth Advocates. Her current research focuses on children’s use of networked technologies, and the use of big data for predictive policing. She is the co-principal investigator (with Jane Bailey) of The eQuality Project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which is examining young people’s experiences of privacy and equality in networked spaces.  She is also the lead researcher on the Young Canadian in a Wired World project (YCWW), which has been tracking young people’s use of new media since 1999. 

As a co-investigator of the Big Data Surveillance project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Valerie Steeves is co-leading (with Stéphane Leman-Langlois) research Stream Three: Governance. This stream will examine the use of big data for policing and other forms of social control.

Ciara Bracken-Roche is a second-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology. Ciara received her BSc. from the University of Toronto and her MA from the University of Warwick, UK. Her Masters thesis was entitled ‘The Biopolitics of Security: Implications for the Border and for Identity’ with a specific focus on the European Union’s bordering systems, and databases. Ciara’s ongoing interest is in the relationships between the state, society and the individual with a strong theoretical background in international relations and critical security studies. Her dissertation research analyzes the contribution of unmanned aerial systems to the rapid expansion of security, policing and commercial surveillance. Ciara sits on a number of departmental committees as well as being a member of the graduate student union's social team.

Sachil is currently a Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa, where he is working on the SSHRC-funded 'Big Data Surveillance' project with Co-investigator, Professor Valerie Steeves. They are currently examining medical Point of Care (PoC) tools and algorithmic imaginings of race to see if algorithms extend the logics within PoC tools or constrain them. More generally, he is interested in the different ways in which social sorting performed by institutions influences the social (dis)advantages of citizens. His main interest in this relationship is in studies of credit scoring, digital consumption, race relations and health care. He has published on most of these topics in the Journal of Southern African Studies, Security Dialogue, and the Routledge Companion to Digital Consumption (London: Routledge).

Sachil completed his PhD in the Department of Sociology at Queen's University (2016). His dissertation, titled 'The Reproduction of Social Disadvantage in South Africa: mapping consumer credit scoring onto the ANC’s policy of "social transformation"', provides conceptual contributions to African Studies (social sorting and cumulative disadvantage), and a contextual contribution to Surveillance Studies (South Africa).

Sachil is also currently a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Queen's University, where he serves as an instructor for the Sociology of Globalization (SOCY 225). He may be contacted at singh.sachil@queensu.ca.