The Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics (CIIP) research group is pleased to invite you to a keynote talk by Jonathan W. Y. Gray, on Thursday 12 March 2026, 12:00-13.00 GMT (keynote in the Digital Media Symposium: Research and Practices, Lecture Theatre A, Winchester School of Art, organised by MA Digital Media Practices team and doctoral researchers at WSA)
Public Data Cultures
Jonathan W. Y. Gray’s recent book, Public Data Cultures, nurtures critical and creative engagements with public data as cultural material, medium of participation and as site of transnational politics. It explores how activists, journalists, artists and others work with public data as well as looking at how critical perspectives can make a difference in practice.
Jonathan W. Y. Gray (@jwyg) is a researcher critically and creatively exploring the roles of digital data, methods and infrastructures in shaping how we know and live together. His work is grounded in feminist science and technology studies, new media studies, critical theory and philosophy. He is Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Culture and Reader in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London.
He is author of Public Data Cultures (Polity, 2025) and co-editor of Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (with Martin Eve, MIT Press, 2020) and The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards A Critical Data Practice (with Liliana Bounegru, Amsterdam University Press, 2021). His research has been published in journals such as New Media and Society; Information, Communication & Society; Big Data and Society; and Statistique et Société.
He is co-founder of the Public Data Lab; Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam; and Research Associate at the médialab at Sciences Po founded by Bruno Latour. He has taught with the School for Poetic Computation in NYC. He is part of the advisory group for the Critical Infrastructure Studies Collective and co-editor of the Digital Studies book series on Amsterdam University Press.
He is Hakka-Chinese-Malaysian-Singaporean-American-Scottish, contributes to the work of several anti-racism and East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) community groups and serves on the committee of King’s College London’s Race Equality Network.
Jonathan has been involved in setting up various digital commons initiatives such as The Public Domain Review and Open Data for Tax Justice. He is an advisor to the Fair Tax Foundation, LSE Impact Blog and MediArXiv.
More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org.
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MA Digital Media Practices annual symposium, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton
The annual one day 'Digital Media: Research and Practice' Symposium will be held by the MA Digital Media programme and the PGR community at the Winchester School of Art on 12th March 2026. In an era where mobile media, artificial intelligence, 3D digitalisation, immersive platforms and collaborative digital storytelling are continuously transforming modes of cultural interaction. So, in this symposium, we want to bring together academics, postgraduate students and industry practitioners to showcase their research and creative media practice to collectively contemplate how to redefine the bubble of digital media in research and practices. The symposium is expected to run from 10.30 am to 4.30 pm, with lunch and refreshment breaks.
See full schedule and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/digital-media-symposium-research-and-practice-tickets-1984398561516
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Full Spring Speaker Series: https://criticalinfrastructures.net/events/ciip-spring-speaker-series-2026/
CIIP talks are organised in collaboration with MA Digital Media and MA Fine Art in the Department of Art and Media Technology, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.