The Digital Majority Centre (DMC)

University of Salzburg

Hanan Badr is full professor at the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria. She heads the division Public Spheres and Inequalities. Adopting a critical decolonial lens, her work focuses on inequalities and communication, global and exiled journalism, comparing media systems as well as (digital) activism and transformation. Recent books include Critical Communication Research with Global Inclusivity” (2026), “Cosmopolitan Communication Studies” (2025), “Arab Berlin; Dynamics of Transformation” (2023), and “Media Governance: A cosmopolitan critique” (2022). She was Associate Editor of Journal of Communication and Journalism Practice. She is the first Arab professor in the field of communication studies in the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland). Hanan studied in Cairo and Erfurt. She held positions at Freie Universität Berlin, Gulf University for Sciences and Technology in Kuwait and Orient-Institut Beirut/Max Weber Foundation. She is mother of two.

University of Sharjah

Jairo Lugo-Ocando, PhD (University of Sussex) is Professor of Journalism Studies and the Dean of the College of Communication at the University of Sharjah, U.A.E. Previously he was the Director for Graduate Studies and Executive Education at Northwestern University in Qatar and Deputy Head of the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leads, UK.

Over the years he has received over UK £1.2 million in external research grants from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Qatar National Research Fund, the Leverhulme Trust and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities in Scotland, among other institutions. Additionally, he was recipient of the Theodore C. Sorensen Fellowship from the John F. Kennedy Library and was a visiting fellow at the National University of Singapore.

His books include Science Journalism in the Arab World (2023), ‘The News Media in Puerto Rico. Journalism in Colonial Settings and in Times of Crises’ (Routledge, 2020), ‘Media & Governance in Latin America. Towards a Plurality of Voices’ (Peter Lang, 2020) and ‘Foreign Aid and Journalism in the Global South. A Mouthpiece for Truth’ (Lexington Books, 2020).

Before becoming an academic, he worked as a journalist, correspondent and news editor for several media outlets in Latin America and continues to be engaged with the mainstream news media as regular commentator of Al-Jazeera, columnist in several newspapers, while being vice-president of Golfo Radio 98.3 FM radio in Qatar, which is the first free-to-air radio station in Spanish and Portuguese in the Middle East.

Universidade Federal de Pelotas (Brazil) and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)

Raquel Recuero is a professor and researcher both at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel) and at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in the departments of Information Science, Communication Science, and Applied Linguistics. Hear broad research interests focus on the themes of discourse, disinformation, violence and digital platforms, particularly in the context of the Global South and Latin America. She is currently the director of the MIDIARS Laboratory (Social Media, Network Analysis and Discourse - https://wp.ufpel.edu.br/midiars/.

Human Sciences Research Centre

International Institute of Information Technology

Dr. Rajorshi Ray is an Assistant Professor at the Human Sciences Research Centre (HSRC), International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He received his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT Kanpur). His doctoral dissertation, “Social Networks and Their Role in Structuring Entrepreneurship in Platform-Mediated Service Work in India,” examined how social networks shape entrepreneurial practices within platform-based service economies. During his doctoral studies, Dr. Ray was awarded prestigious scholarships from the Oxford Internet Institute and Chalmers Institute of Technology.

Dr. Ray’s research interests focus on understanding the socio-economic practices and processes that shape digital societies. Using mixed-methods approaches that combine computational techniques and ethnography, his current work explores digital money, social interactions, mobility, entrepreneurship, and labour. He actively collaborates with leading international institutions, including IIT Kanpur, Florida State University, and the Danish Institute of Advanced Sciences, to examine how digital economic transactions influence informal markets in India.

His work has been published in reputed journals such as the Journal of South Asian Development and Asian Studies Review. His co-authored book, Platform Economies in India, is forthcoming in early 2026. He is currently working on his next book project, which examines the digital economy within Indian households.

Universidade Federal Fluminense   

Professor Afonso de Albuquerque is a full professor at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies, Fluminense Federal University, Niteroi, Brazil. He currently leads the research project National Institute for Science and Technology - Informational Disputes and Sovereignty. His research interests include political communication, journalism studies, and comparative communication studies.

Emerging Technologies Initiative, Multiracial Democracy Project, GW Law

Dr Dhanaraj Thakur leads the Emerging Technologies Initiative within the George Washington University Law School that examines the impacts of AI on a racially inclusive democracy. He was previously Research Director at the Center for Democracy & Technology, and has for the last 15 years worked to advance equity and human rights in tech policy. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from Georgia Tech.  

Peking University

Dr. Pu Yan is an Assistant Professor and Researcher at the Department of Information Management, Peking University, China. She holds a PhD degree on Information, Communication, and Social Science from the University of Oxford (Oxford Internet Institute), where she also completed her MSc with Distinction. Prior to Oxford, she obtained her Bachelor's degrees from Tsinghua University. She focuses on Computational Social Science, Digital Inequality, and Algorithmic Governance. Her research bridges grounded fieldwork with big data analytics to explore the algorithmic society, specifically investigating digital divides, AI literacy, and cross-cultural communication mechanisms in global issues such as climate change. She leads international projects such as PKU-UCL seeds partnership fund, as well as projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), with publications in leading journals such as Information, Communication & Society and Telematics and Informatics and prestigious conferences such as ICWSM.

She is interested in research collaboration on algorithmic divides, AI governance, and digital sociology. She particularly welcomes joint projects advancing Computational Social Science methodologies, utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) for Social Science, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Computer Vision (Image Analysis) for multimodal media research. She has a strong interest in projects that provide global perspectives, evidenced by recent work such as comparing the impact of AI labelling on public trust between China and Germany.

College of Staten Island

Prof. Bilge Yesil is a Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island and an affiliate faculty member in Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She received her PhD from New York University in Media, Culture, and Communication and holds an MA in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prof. Yesil’s research expertise encompasses global media and communication, media in authoritarian systems, surveillance, ownership and regulation.