Jessica Feldman

Jessica Feldman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab. She earned a Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University in 2017. She studies the ethics of localized and decentralized communication, consensus, and trust models, as they can apply to mobile mesh networks and distributed multiparty cryptographic methods. Her dissertation, titled “Listening Intently: Towards a Critical Media Theory of Ethical Listening” considers how advances in the surveillance of cell phone data, decentralized mobile networks, and vocal affective monitoring software are changing the ways in which listening exerts power and frames social and political possibilities. Her fellowship project, titled “Distribute, Randomize, Rotate: Democratic Values in Design for Decentralized Data”, aims to work out theories of normative ethics for these new modes of relating, and to influence the development of digital tools in order to inscribe democratic values at low and middle layers of their design.