What are you currently working on?

Although I have just completed my PhD (and now I will enjoy a very-well-deserved vacation), I will be continuing to explore a question that emerged throughout the past years: how people assign responsibility and explain causality for social problems.

My doctoral research focused on the consequences of dis/connectivity in adolescents' lives, but it gradually became clear that many debates about technology are not really about technology itself. They are about how we interpret behaviour, vulnerability, agency, and responsibility. These interpretations are never neutral—they are shaped by moral values, political ideologies, cultural norms, and economic interests. As a result, I became increasingly interested in understanding how these ways of interpreting the world are created and how they shape public policy, education, and everyday life, while often obscuring the broader social, political, and economic structures that organise digital society.

That shift in perspective also changed the kinds of questions I find relevant to ask. If many of the problems we attribute to individuals are rooted in the way our digitalised society is organised, then changing individual behaviour can only take us so far. We must also ask how the systems themselves could be different. That is why I am increasingly interested in a more pragmatic question: if today's digital infrastructure concentrates so much power in the hands of a few private actors and reproduces an exploitative economy, what would alternative digital infrastructures actually look like? Rather than simply asking how people should behave online or the consequences of specific online behaviour, I want to think about how we might redesign the digital environments in which those behaviours take place.

 

Can you share a project that changed the way you think or work? 

One project that made these ideas much more tangible for me was a project on developing robots to assist with household tasks (some call them “domestic butlers”). Observing academics involved in this kind of research made even clearer to me how every aspect of society—including research itself—is embedded within broader social, economic, and political structures. Research is too often presented as a neutral activity driven simply by curiosity or the pursuit of progress, but the questions we choose to investigate, the problems we define, and the solutions we prioritise are also shaped by the society in which research takes place.

In this case, the technological solution was aimed at addressing everyday domestic challenges, but it reflected a particular way of imagining social problems: one where technological innovation becomes the primary response to social struggle, while the underlying organisation of labour, care, and inequality remains unquestioned. We are all operating within systems that influence what appears possible or worth pursuing. This experience reinforced my scepticism toward techno-enthusiastic and accelerationist narratives that assume innovation is automatically equivalent to progress. I think researchers in the technology field must focus much more on what kinds of societies technology help reproducing.

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Which piece of work feels closest to your heart, and why?

At the moment, it is a paper I am writing that compares neoliberal ethics with feminist ethics of care.

What makes this project particularly meaningful to me is that, despite being my first attempt in directly touching to the field of morality and ethics, it tries to move beyond criticism. A large part of critical research is dedicated to understanding how existing systems operate: for example, how capitalist mechanisms shape institutions, behaviours, and social relations, and how inequalities are produced and maintained. This work is essential, but I think critique needs to be accompanied by the exploration of alternative ways of organising society.

I think that feminist ethics of care offers precisely this possibility. It proposes a different way of thinking about society, one that places relationships, interdependence, and collective responsibility at its centre, rather than autonomy, competition, and individual optimisation. It starts from the recognition that vulnerability and dependency are not failures or exceptions to overcome, but fundamental aspects of human existence.

I think this perspective is particularly important in the current moment. Many of the challenges we face—from digital technologies to climate change, from economic inequality to political authoritarianism—cannot be addressed through individual responsibility alone. They require us to rethink the values that organise our societies and recognise that our well-being is fundamentally interconnected. For me, ethics of care provides not only a critique of existing moral frameworks, but also a different vocabulary for imagining what a more just society could look like. That combination of critical understanding and constructive imagination is where I believe research can become truly transformative.

 

What's a question you keep returning to?

Most of my research interests now base themselves around the following question: How do systems of power become normal, and why do we participate in reproducing them?

Whether we're talking about digital technologies, education, work, or media, I am interested in how exploitative systems become accepted as inevitable or even desirable—even when they produce inequalities or forms of exploitation. How are these systems of power organised? How do they shape our values, expectations, and ideas about what is possible? And, perhaps most importantly, how can we imagine and build alternatives?

I am aware that these are difficult questions because they cannot be answered from a single perspective. In digital society, for example, we cannot understand people's behaviours without also understanding the political economy of technology, cultural norms, educational institutions, family relationships, legal frameworks, and the infrastructures that connect them all. Ultimately, these questions require collective efforts across disciplines and beyond academia.

 

If you had a tagline or motto, what would it be? 

“If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.” It is a famous saying in my culture, and I think it captures something essential. It reminds us that we cannot understand the world by imagining simple substitutions or hypothetical scenarios detached from reality. The conditions that surround a phenomenon cannot be ignored. 

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If time, money, and logistics weren't a concern, what dream project would you dive into?

In fact, my answer above matters a lot in answering to this question. If time, money, and logistics were not concerns, I would like to work on designing and building alternative digital infrastructures—systems that allow connectivity without turning every interaction into a source of surveillance, extraction, or control. However, the fact that material constraints exist does not mean that alternatives are impossible; it means we need to understand the conditions required to make them viable.

One of the things I find fascinating about the history of the internet is that alternative visions have always existed. The internet was not created as a purely commercial space; many of its early developments were connected to ideals of openness, decentralisation, knowledge sharing, and collective experimentation. Over time, however, much of the digital ecosystem became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of private actors whose business models depend on extracting value from users' data and attention.

What interests me is not the idea that we need to "escape" technology, but that we need to reclaim the possibility of organising technology differently. Across history, communities of researchers, activists, developers, and users have created alternative infrastructures that resist centralisation and commodification. My dream project would build on these traditions to develop digital ecosystems based on privacy, care, and collective ownership. Ultimately, the question is not only how we can make people use existing platforms better, but whether we can create digital environments that reflect different values from the beginning. 

 

What's one thing you wish someone had told you when you were starting out as a scholar? 

That you cannot escape the systems you may end up criticising, but you know you will have time and resources to find a way to challenge them.

Academia, like any institution, has its own incentives, hierarchies, and contradictions. It is much powerful than it wants to look like, and pretending otherwise makes us blind to the ways in which we are also part of the structures we analyse. But recognising this does not mean giving up on change or accepting everything as inevitable. It means being reflexive about your own position and making conscious choices about where you draw your boundaries: what you are willing to compromise on, and what you are not. I think this is particularly important for scholars, because critique is not about standing outside the systems we study. It is about understanding our own place within them and deciding how we want to act despite their constraints.

 

What is a book or paper that shaped the way you think about the world?

I would actually mention two books, because they are connected in the way they shaped my thinking. The first is The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor W. Adorno and his collaborators, including Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford.

It is an extraordinary piece of social science. Beyond its already important conclusions, what impressed me most was the research itself: hundreds of pages combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to answer one fundamental question—why do some individuals become more receptive to authoritarian and, specifically, fascist ideologies than others? Despite being published in 1950, many of the patterns it identifies still feel remarkably relevant today. More importantly, it showed me the value of taking complex social questions seriously and using multiple methods to understand how broader social conditions shape individual beliefs and behaviours.

The second book is Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which I see as closely connected to the first one. If The Authoritarian Personality helped me think about how social structures and conditions shape people's orientations toward power and authority, Zuboff helped me understand how contemporary digital infrastructures themselves are reproducing those structures and orientations.

This is also a demanding book, but it fundamentally changes how you think about digital technologies—not as neutral tools, but as infrastructures embedded in economic and political systems built around the extraction of behavioural data and the concentration of power. It helped me connect everyday digital experiences to much broader questions about governance, inequality, and social organisation.

 

Who's someone whose work deserves more attention - and who you want to nominate as the next featured scholar? 

I think research on media effects would benefit from engaging much more seriously with political economy. For that reason, I'd recommend The Political Economy of Media and Communication: Methodological Approaches by Joan Pedro-Carañana, Rodrigo Gómez, Thomas F. Corrigan and Francisco Sierra Caballero. It provides a broad framework for understanding how ownership, markets, regulation, and economic incentives shape media systems—long before we begin measuring their effects on individuals—and suggests several relevant methodologies in analysing complex social systems.

As for a scholar, despite my own interests gradually moving toward more theoretical and interdisciplinary work, I would like to nominate someone from the quantitative media effects tradition who has consistently combined methodological rigour with critical reflection on the limitations of their own methods (and who also just got their PhD!). I think that's an important quality in any researcher: producing strong empirical evidence while remaining aware of what that evidence can—and cannot—tell us. I am talking about Julius Klingelhoefer.