Neal Hartman is a Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management who focuses on organizational communication issues. His teaching of management communication and intercultural communication emphasizes working in teams, conflict and conflict resolution, leadership, and cross-cultural communication. Hartman has lectured on cross-cultural, leadership, and organizational communication issues, and has taught in the International MBA Programs at Tsinghua, Fudan, and Zhongshan (Lingnan College) Universities in China. He also serves as co-lead facilitator for CMI-Enterprises, which is part of the Cambridge-MIT Initiative, working with undergraduate students from MIT Sloan, Cambridge University, and other European universities to develop their entrepreneurial skills. Hartman holds a BA in music theory and composition and an MS in higher education administration from the University of South Carolina and an ABD in organizational communication from the University of Texas.
Benjamin Dean is a Fellow for Internet Governance and Cyber-security at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in New York City. In this role, he works at the intersection of technology and public policy. Benjamin has lived and worked in seven countries over the past decade: his native Australia, China, India, Bhutan, France, the USA and Venezuela. He spent three years working as a research assistant in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Center for Entrepreneurship, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Local Development. In this role, he worked on a variety of projects including entrepreneurship and innovation policy reviews of Thailand and Mexico, the SME Financing Scoreboard and intellectual property rights management by SMEs. For the past few years, Benjamin has concentrated on digital and information policy as well as working in New York's start-up scene. He is presently interested in developing alternatives to the advertising business model, which has led to the wide-spread surveillance and control of information on the internet.
Nader Habibi is the Henry J. Leir Professor of Practice in the Economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. His current research project is focused on labor market conditions for university graduates in the Middle East. He also maintains a website on issues of underemployment and overeducation in developing countries (www.overeducation.org) Before joining Brandeis University in June 2007, he served as managing director of economic forecasting and risk analysis for Middle East and North Africa in Global Insight Ltd. Mr. Habibi has more than 25 years of experience in teaching, research and management positions; including vice-president for research in Iran Banking Institute (Tehran), assistant professor of economics in Bilkent University (Ankara), research fellow and lecturer on political economy of Middle East at Yale University. The author of one book on bureaucratic corruption and several articles in refereed journals; he earned his Ph.D. in economics at Michigan State University. His most recent research projects include an analysis of the excess supply of college graduates in MENA countries, impact of economic sanctions on Iranian economy and the impact of Arab Spring uprisings on economic conditions of the affected countries. Habibi also serves as director of Islamic and Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He has recently published a work of fiction about Middle East geopolitics titled: Three Stories One Middle East (2014).
I am currently an Associate Professor of Digital Media & Creative Industries in the School of International Communications and Research Director for the Faculty of Arts & Education at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, where I have worked since 2007. In 2015 I assumed the interim directorship of the AHRC Centre for Digital Copyright and IP Research in China. I have published numerous journal articles and book chapters on digital media, the creative industries and Northern Irish politics. My first book, Digital Media and Society: transforming economics, politics and social practices, was released in paperback, hardback and e-book by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014 and a Portuguese translation will be published soon.
My research interests cover issues of governance, accountability and ethics in forms of science, technology and organization. I draw on ideas from ethnomethodology, science and technology studies (in particular forms of radical and reflexive scepticism, constructivism, Actor-Network Theory and the recent STS turn to markets and other forms of organizing) and my research is ethnographic in orientation. In particular I am interested in the question of how entities (objects, values, relationships, processes and also people) become of the world. My substantive interests are quite varied. Across a number of research projects I have ethnographically engaged with: security and surveillance, traffic management, waste, airports, biometrics, parking, signposts, malaria vaccines, Universities, algorithms and speeding drivers. Through these projects I have looked into ontology, notions of equivalence, parasitism, the mundane, market failures, problems and solutions, deleting, value and the utility of social science.
I am currently the Head of the Economics Department at the University of Pretoria, and the Managing Editor of the South African Journal of Economics. I received my BA (Economics) from the Oregon State University, and my MA and PhD (Economics) from the Pennsylvania State University.
