The Center is delighted to welcome a new postdoctoral fellow, Sarah Widmer, who will work on the Childhood, Intimacy and Surveillance Practices (CHiP) project. Sarah obtained her PhD in political geography from the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. In her dissertation, she studied the uses of “new spatial media”, with a focus on applications that algorithmically personalize maps and search results according to users’ past locations. Her work explores how digital data and algorithms mediate the ways in which we inhabit space and exist as urban subjects. Between 2016 and 2018, she was based at the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS) at the Technical University Munich, where she worked on different aspects of big data urbanism, notably on predictive policing and the smartification of urban security.

Welcome Sarah!