Chris Gilliard, PhD
Co-Director
Chris Gilliard, PhD, is a writer, professor, and speaker whose scholarship examines digital privacy, surveillance, and the intersections of race, class, and technology. She was recently a JustTech Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, and Visiting Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center. Dr. Gilliard is a member of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry Scholars Council and Surveillance Technology Oversight Project community advisory board. His book Luxury Surveillance is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2025.
Dr. Gillard’s recent work posits that while minoritized and poor people have the greatest vulnerability to intrusive and experimental forms of surveillance, privileged people are not as exempt from probing sensors as they imagine themselves to be. In fact, their embrace of luxury surveillance technologies expands the surveillant gaze far beyond the eyes of the state. His writing traverses the involuntary imposition of carceral technologies on Black Detroit and public school classrooms, to the willing middle class embrace of high status gadgets that encourages a surveillant gaze far beyond the eyes of the state.
Joan Donovan, PhD
Co-Director, Founder
Joan Donovan, PhD, is an award-winning sociologist and Assistant Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media Studies at Boston University. She is coauthor of Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America. Dr. Donovan’s research focuses on media manipulation and democracy. Her work has been showcased in various outlets such as NPR, The New York Times, MIT Technology Review and more. She is the former Research Director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy.
She also co-created the beaver emoji. 🦫
Contact: Joan@publicinterestinter.net
On social media as BostonJoan
Our Work
The technologies we build to communicate with one another have a significant impact on how we define, organize, and solve problems as a society. Co-directed by Chris Gilliard and Joan Donovan, the Critical Internet Studies Institute (CISI) is an organization whose goal is two-fold. We detect, document, and debunk how our current internet infrastructure is exploited by those looking to disrupt social institutions and derail democracy. We also work with practitioners to coproduce a "Public Interest Internet," an infrastructure that would support the distribution of TALK (Timely Accurate Local Knowledge) and be responsive to community concerns.
CISI fosters knowledge mobilization with the goal of turning intelligence into action. This is through organizing advocacy to design a public interest internet: one that puts safety and privacy at the core of its design. CISI implements unique public engagement projects with exceptional research collaborators and creative educational programs to identigy strategies to combat misinformation-at-scale, ensure community safety and privacy, and make a public interest internet possible. We aim to generate a whole-of-society approach to combating hate, harassment, and incitement.
Activists have long asked, “Is another world possible?” We ask:
IS ANOTHER WEB POSSIBLE?
It’s no longer enough to point out what is wrong with technology and hope the message reaches key stakeholders. We must also build capacity across sectors – from journalism, civil society, academia, technology, to policymaking – so that we can develop institutional resilience and bring about the web we deserve.
ALL donations support research and public education.
