Rate My Professor Lina Dencik

Lina Dencik is Professor and University Research Leader in AI Justice in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She earned her PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2010 with a doctoral thesis titled News Practices and Theories of Global Civil Society. Previously based at Cardiff University where she co-founded and directed the Data Justice Lab, Dencik now leads research on the relationship between digital media and social change, with a particular emphasis on the politics of data and artificial intelligence. Her work investigates datafication across key domains including welfare, work, policing, and migration, exploring issues of governance, resistance, policy, regulation, and the potential for more just computational infrastructures. Dencik adopts an interdisciplinary critical social science approach, integrating insights from media studies, computer science, and law to address social justice concerns arising from AI and data-driven technologies.

Dencik has secured major funding, including an ERC Starting Grant for the DATAJUSTICE project and, most recently, a €2.5 million ERC Advanced Grant for STATETECH, which examines state-tech relations in the datafied European welfare state, focusing on AI implementations in public bodies such as predictive fraud systems and algorithmic diagnostics. She also leads projects like Data Scores as Governance, Civic Participation in a Datafied Society, and Advancing Data Justice in the Future Generations Well-being Act, funded by the Open Society Foundations and EPSRC, as well as Democracy, AI and Big Tech under the Trans-Atlantic Platform Scheme/ESRC. Her influential publications include the co-edited books Data Justice (Sage, 2022), The Media Manifesto (Polity, 2020), and Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society (Polity, 2018); edited volumes Journalism, Citizenship and Surveillance Society (Routledge, 2020) and The Future of Journalism: Risks, Threats and Opportunities (Routledge, 2018); and recent articles such as Decentering Technology in the Datafied Workplace (International Journal of Communication, 2026), What role can governance play in data justice? (Dialogues on Digital Society, 2025), and The Amazonification of Royal Mail and postal worker identity (Platforms & Society, 2025). She has produced reports including AI Inequalities at Work (Data Justice Lab, 2025), Risking Lives: Smart Borders, Private Interests and AI Policy in Europe (2023), and The Datafied Workplace and Trade Unions in the UK (2023). Dencik's research informs national and international media and policy debates, evidenced by her submission of evidence to the UK Parliament's Business and Trade Select Committee on the Employment Rights Bill in 2024. She welcomes PhD supervision in big data and AI, digital activism, social and data justice, and governance.