Biography

Dr Jun Yu is a sociologist of communication and culture, presently working as a Policy Analyst for the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) of the OECD, focusing on how digital and data technologies can help foster children’s wellbeing and social and emotional development.

As a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Media and Communications, his own research agenda concentrates on the intersection of datafication, digital platforms, social theory, and digital ethics. Specifically, his current research has two distinct yet interrelated strands: first, examining how algorithms and data practices are increasingly embedded in, thereby reweaving, the larger web of social and ethical relationships of solidarity and recognition; second, investigating how the continuing extraction and automated processing of personal data and the following categorisation of individuals pose and institutionalise a threat to privacy as freedom and autonomy. These are explored in a series of ongoing and recently completed research projects, such as his PhD thesis on social solidarity and algorithmic communication; the ongoing study of mediated visibility and recognition (with Assistant Professor João Vieira Magalhães at the University of Groningen), and; the project The Price of Connection (with Professor Nick Couldry).

Dr Yu holds a PhD in Media and Communications from the LSE Department of Media and Communications, and until recently he taught at three LSE Departments: Media and Communications, Management, and Sociology. Before joining the department in 2015 as a PhD researcher, he was serving as a Policy Officer at the government-approved media regulator in South Korea, collaborating in a range of projects with the International Telecommunication Union. He holds two Master’s degrees: one in Sociology from the University of Cambridge (Christ’s College) and the other in Media and Communications from the LSE, and a Bachelor’s degree in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London.