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.
Richard Holden is Professor of Economics at the UNSW Australia Business School and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow from 2013-2017. Prior to that he was on the faculty at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a PhD from Harvard University in 2006, where he was a Frank Knox Scholar. His research focuses on contract theory, law and economics, and political economy. He has written on topics including: political districting, the boundary of the firm, incentives in organizations, mechanism design, and voting rules. Professor Holden has published in top general interest journals such as the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He is currently editor of the Journal of Law and Economics, and is the founding director of the Herbert Smith Freehills Inititative on Law & Economics at UNSW. He has been a Visiting Professor of Economics at the MIT Department of Economics and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. His research has been featured in press articles in such outlets as: The New York Times, The Financial Times, the New Republic, and the Daily Kos.
