Conference Chairs

Tania Lewis is Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Over the past 2 decades her work has critically engaged with the politics of lifestyle, sustainability and consumption. Her most recent book Digital Food: from Paddock to Platform (Bloomsbury) analyzes how our relationship to food consumption, production, and politics is being re-mediated through digitally connected electronic devices, practices and content. By drawing together the world of food and the digital, the book speaks to a number of pressing contemporary themes, including the shifting dynamics of work and leisure in increasingly digitised homes; the transformation of food media in a post-broadcast, video-sharing environment; and the complex relations between platform politics, food citizenship and activism.

Alexandra Zafiroglu is a Professor of Cybernetics at the Australian National University’s 3A Institute (3Ai) and a Fellow of the ANU Futures scheme.  After completing her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Brown University in 2004, she joined Intel as a Research Scientist, where she held various roles across the company within the People and Practices, Digital Home, and Internet of Things divisions. In 2016 she was appointed Principal Engineer in Social Science within the Internet of Things Division and was Intel’s foremost domain expert and research practitioner in homes and home life. Her central research interests lie in cyber-physical systems and the deployment of artificial intelligence across industries. She explores the relationship between humans and machine sensing, particularly the role that social scientists play in exercising ethics, accountability, and data rights in the deployment of commercial cyber-physical systems.