[Asis-l] SILS Professor Zeynep Tufekci Named Andrew Carnegie Fellow

[Perales, Katherine Pearl]

SILS Professor Zeynep Tufekci Named Andrew Carnegie Fellow

Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (SILS), has been named an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York for her proposal "Big Data and the Algorithmic Threat to Democracy and Civil Society."

The new annual fellowship program provides up to $200,000 to scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences who are pursuing research on the challenges facing U.S. democracy and international order in the next 25 years. Recipients are enabled to take a sabbatical of between one and two years to research and write.

Tufekci's research interests revolve around the intersection of technology and society, and her academic work focuses on social movements and civics, privacy and surveillance, and social interaction. She is also increasingly known for her work on "big data" and algorithmic decision-making.

"This fellowship will allow me to study the implications of the emergence of behavioral 'big data' and the associated algorithms and analytics that are applied to these data for civics, society and privacy," said Tufekci. "I was surprised and thrilled to be given this opportunity to spend a year studying such an important topic!"

In addition to her appointment with SILS, Tufekci has an affiliate appointment at the UNC Department of Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is also a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and was previously a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at the Princeton University. Originally from Turkey, and formerly a computer programmer, Tufekci became interested in the social impacts of technology and began to focus on how digital and computational technology interact with social, political and cultural dynamics. Her work has appeared in a wide range of outlets, from peer-reviewed journals to traditional media and blogging platforms. Her forthcoming book Beautiful Teargas: The Ecstatic, Fragile Politics of Networked Protest in the 21st Century, to be published by Yale University Press, will examine the dynamics, strengths and weaknesses of 21st century social movements.

Tufekci is currently a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times and also publishes essays at The Message on Medium, a new media platform. She can be found online on Twitter as @zeynep, and on her personal blog, http://www.technosociology.org.

For more information, visit http://sils.unc.edu/news/2015/carnegie-tufecki or http://acfellows.carnegie.org/#!/.

Katherine Pearl Perales
Communications Coordinator
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Manning Hall 04, CB# 3360
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360
kpearl at email.unc.edu<mailto:kpearl at email.unc.edu>
Phone: (919) 843-8337
sils.unc.edu<http://sils.unc.edu/>




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