MA Candidate

Bibi is an MA student in Sociology at Queen’s University researching theoretical and methodological approaches to swarm drones in the Media, Information and Surveillance stream. In 2020 she graduated from an MA in Political Studies with a thesis on biometrics in Iraq and Afghanistan also from Queen’s. Bibi works as the project coordinator of the Gender Lab at the Centre for International and Defence policy, managing and researching on multiple grants on the topic of women and gender perspectives in the military.

David is a first-year MA student in Sociology at Queen’s University under the supervision of Professor David Murakami Wood. His main research interests are radical right-wing populism and artificial intelligence. Consequent to beginning his MA studies David was awarded the Arthur B. McDonald Prize for Academic Excellence by Queen’s University. In 2020 he graduated from the Sociology department at St. Francis Xavier University. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Canadian Sociological Associations ‘Outstanding Graduate’ award for his BA thesis on text generating AI’s and their potential applications for disinformation campaigns. His work on test generating AIs has been presented at international conferences and is currently being published in a collected work.

Currently, David is conducting research on adtech and the intersection between surveillance capitalism and AI infrastructure. He recently published a co-authored article in The Conversation Canada with David Murakami Wood on evolving Google adtech technology and is working on follow-up publications on the future of Google's AI research, and its scope beyond advertising.

Jesse Gordon held a BDS student internship as a Jr. Policy Analyst with BDS Partner the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia (OIPC BC) from May to August 2018. Gordon assisted the office in collecting evidence in investigating the case of Cambridge Analytica, Aggregate IQ, and Facebook. To read about his experience there, see page 10 of the SSC Annual Newsletter, Issue 7 (June 2019).