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Dr Peaks Krafft to lead MA Internet Equalities at UAL Creative Computing Institute

Portrait shot of Peaks Krafft
Portrait shot of Peaks Krafft
Dr Peaks Krafft © David Fisher
Written by
Cat Cooper Published date
17 December 2020

UAL is excited to announce that Dr Peaks Krafft is to lead MA Internet Equalities at UAL’s Creative Computing Institute. Now enrolling for 2021, the course is designed to challenge power relations and dismantle systems of oppression and inequality built into internet platforms, companies and technologies.

Dr Krafft is a values-driven computer scientist, academic and community organiser, whose recent work is centred on 4 issues in higher education and tech: social impacts of technology; personal and institutional accountability; anti-racism in organisations and conflicts of interest from tech funding.

Coming to the Creative Computing Institute from the Oxford Internet Institute in the University of Oxford’s Social Science Division, Dr. Krafft holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Their research, teaching and organising champions social responsibility and social justice, promoting how communities can build power. They have published and presented extensively on topics including participatory change in digital institutions, data visualisation, AI, casualisation and ethics. Dr. Krafft co-directs the Critical Platform Studies Group (CritPlat): an international research collective which interrogates and intervenes on structures of power that are produced or reproduced by software.

As Course Leader, Dr Krafft will work with students to progress concepts around values-driven work, exploring together what areas the tech sector could prioritise and what practical skills development is needed for doing anti-oppressive work in tech roles and tech-related roles. Dr Krafft will help students to understand the different types of opportunity that could be open to them as practitioners.

I’m interested in how to interrogate what’s missing when we talk about or are involved in data science and computing. How do we move beyond the terms equality, diversity and inclusion, to build counter-power to the modes of oppression in society that are replicated within tech? For many who are marginalised, the status quo remains a central barrier to our presence and progression in the fields of computer science and human computer interaction. I’m equally occupied with how work is organised in tech and higher education, as I am with doing work in these sectors.

— Dr Peaks Krafft, Course Leader and Senior Lecturer, MA Internet Equalities

Georgina Capdevila, Dr Peaks Krafft and Dr Charlotte Webb introduce the course at the MA Internet Equalities Open Day, December 2020.

Ben Stopher, Dean of UAL Creative Computing Institute:

MA Internet Equalities will advance critical debate and practice as we collaborate as a community of computer scientists, designers and students to produce fairer, more empathetic internet technologies. Dr Peaks Krafft brings a fascinating body of research and progressive thinking in this area and we are delighted to welcome them as Course Leader to both contribute to the Institute’s mission and support our students.

The course will draw on principles of participatory design, feminist human computer interaction, digital ethnography and design justice. It examines how scholars and creative practitioners have used frameworks such as Intersectional Critical Race Technology Studies, Digital Feminism, Queer Theory and Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies.

Find out more

Dr Krafft: selection of papers

Groups and projects