School of Communication professor Wendy Chun named British Academy Fellow

Earlier this month, School of Communication professor, Digital Democracies Institute director and Canada 150 Chair Wendy Chun was named a British Academy Fellow.

This honour is reserved for scholars who have achieved high international standing in their branch of study and are nominated by their peers. Chun is grateful for this sign of recognition, at a global scale, for the work that she and her team have achieved.  

“Many of the British Academy’s international fellows  are people I deeply respect—people who have shaped fields,” says Chun.

This honour comes after Chun was also named a Royal Society of Canada Fellow in 2022. While that fellowship focused on her contributions to research in Canada, the British Academy Fellowship reflects Chun’s international contributions and creates more opportunities for international collaborations.

“The British Academy sets up spaces and meetings for its fellows to come together. It’s an amazing group of fellows from the UK and around the world,” says Chun.

Chun is already involved in numerous projects with international partners and impact, as well as eight books, for which she is being recognized.  

Chun’s monographs and scholarly articles investigate how media, technology, and culture define both our current and historical media environments.

“I have a background in both engineering and critical theory, which I bring together in my work.  I usually start with technical artifact and technical defaults—not because I’m a technical determinist—but rather because, by delving deeply and closely into any technology, we can engage the nexus of the technical and the social, executing around us. Cultural and social issues do not lie outside technology. They are not things that technology can solve; nor can the arts or humanities ‘save’ technology. Discrimination and injustice do not simply come from outside the machine—they are ‘in there’ because technological defaults are embedded with cultural and social prejudices. At the same time, not only the problems, but also the outlines of a solution can emerge from ‘in there’ because the technical and social are fused together,” says Chun.

For example, recommendation engines and many networks operate by the principle of homophily, which is the concept that similarity breeds connection.

“This means that echo chambers aren’t an accident, they’re a goal,” says Chun.

Homophily is justified as a technical default, but the term comes from studies of US segregation. The same researchers that coined this term coined the term heterophily, which is the idea that opposites attract. The actual bi-racial housing projects they studied contained myriad connections between the residents.  

“There are many ways that connection is possible, but homophily as default has made similarity the only one,” says Chun.

Drawing from her theoretical and historical investigation with homophily in her latest book, Discriminating Data, Chun and Carina Albrecht, an SFU PhD student, have been mapping the ways in which infrastructure and indifference creates connection.

Chun also heads the Data Fluencies Project. This multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary project, which received over $6 million (CAD) in funding from the Mellon Foundation, works to counter the impacts of discriminatory algorithms and online mis- and disinformation to foster more just and equitable futures. The project brings together humanists, artists, social scientists, data scientists. The SFU co-investigators on this project are: Gillian Russell, Stephanie Dick, Karrmen Crey, Maite Taboada, and Jas Morgan.

“One of our goals is to develop new quantitative and qualitative methods, so we don’t simply repeat surveillance-based methods that social media companies are using. Instead, we bring together insights from the performance studies, critical and literary theory, and computational social sciences to build a richer understanding of online interactions. We are also building experimental techno-social systems that don’t treat past mistakes as the ground truth—these systems thus seek to create radically different futures that learn from—rather than repeat—past injustices.  For this work, our team members are working with communities and students,” says Chun.

Chun is also involved in policy work at the national and international level. She has served as a Commissioner for Democratic Expression and is currently chairing the panel for global standards for AI audits for the International Panel on the Information Environment, an organization based in Zurich. Panel members range from computer scientists who coined the term “algorithmic auditing” to researchers who drafted the US AI bill of rights, and from researchers who work with non-profits based in Africa to leaders in Indigenous data sovereignty. The panel’s goal is to produce a protocol for auditing AI at a global level.   

Digital Democracies Institute

Since joining SFU in 2018, Chun started and has directed the Digital Democracies Institute. The mission of this institute has been to bring together humanists, social scientists, artists and data scientists to take on problems such as polarization, discriminatory algorithms, disinformation, as well as train the next generation of leaders.