Nov. 8, Lunch Workshop ft. Aynne Kokas

Join the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, the East Asia: Transregional Histories Graduate Student Workshop, and the Center for East Asian Studies for a special lunch program featuring Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, Aynne Kokas, on Tuesday, November 8 at 12 pm US CT.

Workshop attendees are invited to read a piece, authored by Professor Aynne Kokas, that is closely related to her book, Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty.

Professor Kokas offers a framework to discuss when a community’s data is moved abroad without their informed consent, a practice she terms data trafficking. She analyzes Grindr, a LGBTQIA+ dating platform that has changed hands between China and the United States to demonstrate what data trafficking is, how it undermines national sovereignty, and how it erodes human rights. In the United States, corporate policies are the leading indicator for data governance practices, influencing a system known as multi-stakeholderism (DeNardis, 2013). In China, forced localization to government servers drives data governance practices (Mueller, 2017; Zeng et al., 2017; Kokas, 2022). Her article extends how we think about transnational consumer data security by examining how weak data security designed to support the growth of Silicon Valley firms amplifies the capacity of extra-territorial data governance practices asserted by the Chinese government.

Access her article HERE.

Registration is REQUIRED and space is LIMITED. Click HERE to secure your spot! (Lunch provided to registered attendees)

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