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Research & Programming

Taking Tech Back: Online Talk Series

Overview

The Taking Tech Back online talk series brings together leading scholars, advocates, and practitioners to discuss the intersections of technology, democracy, human rights, and activism. The goal is to critically examine how technologies that are not serving the public interest can be re-build, re-framed or discontinued, while exploring pathways for more inclusive, rights-focused tech governance frameworks.

Co-organizers

Faculty Co-Lead

Jess Reia

Affiliations

Assistant Professor of Data Science, School of Data Science

Bio

Jess Reia is an assistant professor of data science and a faculty co-lead at the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia (UVA). In 2025, Reia was selected as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. They are also a visiting scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C. Reia works primarily on topics of technology policy and human rights transnationally, being interested in the untold stories in our datasets, citizen-generated data and how artificial intelligence is transforming the way we think about evidence and representation.

A policymaker by training, Reia's research and advocacy agenda has focused on building collaborations with government and civil society organizations in Brazil, Canada, and the U.S. for over a decade, resulting in numerous resources to support policy- and decision-making and academic publications in four languages. Reia is also a public scholar whose writing and interviews were featured in various outlets, including Estadão, Le Devoir and BBC. Before joining UVA, they were appointed Mellon postdoctoral researcher at McGill University, studying the impact of smart-washing and datafication in nocturnal urban spaces and their communities. Reia held a two-year mandate as a member of MTL 24/24's first Night Council in Montreal. Prior to that, they worked at the Center for Technology & Society at FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro.

Reia's latest book, "Urban Music Governance: What Busking Can Teach Us about Data, Policy and Our Cities" (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2025), explores what happens when precarious urban cultural laborers take data collection, laws, and policymaking into their own hands. A transnational exploration of often unseen aspects of urban governance, it examines the intricate limits of legality, data visibility, and resistance from the perspective of those working at the social and regulatory margins of society.

Currently, Reia teaches courses for future data scientists on ethics, governance, and policy. Past courses have included a focus on urban data, digital rights, intellectual property, and research methods.

Full Profile

2025-27 Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Nicole West Bassoff

Nicole West Bassoff is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia. She studies the politics of digital transformations at urban scales.

West Bassoff is trained in the field of science, technology, and society (STS) and holds a PhD in public policy (Harvard University), an MPhil in history and philosophy of science (University of Cambridge) and an AB in history and science (Harvard University). Her work sits at the intersection of STS, urbanism and public policy. She takes a comparative approach to the study of technology policy with a focus on the role of cities and urban politics in the democratic governance of digitization. Her doctoral dissertation examined public controversies surrounding smart city projects in the United States and she is currently developing a cross-national comparative project about the local political frictions produced by the construction of data centers and other resource-intensive infrastructures of the global data economy.

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2026-28 Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Cella Sum

Cella Sum is a postdoctoral research fellow at UVA’s Digital Technology for Democracy Lab. Her research focuses on technology, power, and resistance in labor and community contexts.

Working at the intersection of HCI and STS, she uses qualitative and ethnographic methods to investigate how communities experience, navigate, and contest exploitative sociotechnical structures, such as data-driven systems, surveillance technologies, and AI infrastructure development. Using participatory and speculative design methods, she collaborates with affected communities to co-create more just alternatives. Her work has been published at CSCW, CHI, and Science as Culture.

At the DTD Lab, she will focus on co-designing community-driven policy interventions for data center and AI infrastructure development. Working with local residents, policymakers, technology and energy experts, unions, and community-based organizations, she will co-develop a publicly accessible community-driven policy toolkit centered on sustainability, transparency, equity, accountability, and community needs.

Cella holds a PhD in human-computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and a master’s degree in human-computer interaction and design from UC Irvine. She is a member of Collective Action in Tech and a former tech worker-organizer with Big Cartel Workers Union.

Full Profile

2026-28 Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Fernanda Veiverberg

Fernanda Veiverberg is an interdisciplinary scholar and postdoctoral research fellow at the DTD Lab. Her research explores the cultural and political processes through which digital media shape social perceptions of intimacy and sexuality.

Fernanda employs qualitative methods, digital ethnography, discourse and rhetorical analysis, to examine how media technologies influence cultural narratives, public discourse, and forms of governance. At the DTD Lab, she is expanding her research on the relationships among digital media, sexuality, morality, and emerging technologies, with particular attention to cultural understandings of intimacy, identity, social life, and forms of regulation.

Her PhD dissertation in communication at the University of Southern Mississippi examined the historical and contemporary construction of pornography as legal and cultural discourse in the Southern United States. She also holds an MA in cultural anthropology from the same institution, where her research focused on online sex work. Before pursuing graduate studies in the US, she earned undergraduate degrees in history and philosophy from the Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil, and built an extensive background in Brazilian public education through teaching, educational research, and professional practice.

Fernanda's work has been published in Sexuality & Culture, Sexualities, and Feminist Media Studies, as well as in the De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Cultures. She has also presented her research at numerous national and international conferences.

Full Profile

Research Assistant, UVA

Sam Spivak

Bio coming soon!

Research Assistant, Virginia Tech

Rachel Leach

Bio coming soon!

Taking Tech Back: Online Talk Series

Overview

Co-organizers

Jess Reia

Nicole West Bassoff

Cella Sum

Fernanda Veiverberg

Sam Spivak

Rachel Leach

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