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Sociology Research

 

Flavia is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Cambridge. She holds an undergraduate degree in Media and Communications from the University of Mannheim and a MPhil in the Sociology of Media and Culture from the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

She is interested in the relations between digital technologies, social life, human rights, and safety. In her master’s research, she engaged with the user experience of digital investigators discovering and verifying images and videos of human rights violations and its impact on power and care. She interviewed 20 volunteers, project managers, and leading figures in the open source investigation space, who founded the Digital Verification Corps (Amnesty International) and Human Rights Center Investigations Lab Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research looks into digital safety applications and devices for women to tackle violence against women and girls in the United Kingdom. She is interested in the use, design and deployment of safety technologies and the implications of a datafication of women's safety. She draws from feminist ethics and critical data studies to examine safety technologies.

Flavia is a student fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. She is interested in understanding how AI can impact safety and whether datafication processes do or do not enhance women’s experience of safety in the digital age.

In addition, Flavia is a product owner in the FemTech startup ‘The Blood’ to develop an ethical product for menstrual self-tracking based on biomarkers of period blood that speaks to user experiences, motivations and pain points.

Flavia is always interested in collaboration across fields, especially data and computer science. For instance, she works on an individual and collaborative research project on the data safety of fertility and safety wearables with Anna Ida Hudig (https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/people/haih2) from the Complaint and Accountable Systems Group at the Computer Lab, Cambridge.

Research Interests

media ethics; feminist technoscience; critical data studies; media theory; sociology of safety; sociology of knowledge; digital social research; qualitative research; sociology of human rights; open source investigation.

Teaching

2017 – 2019  Teaching assistant for ‘Introduction to Media and Communications’ and ‘Theories of Media and Communications’ at the University of Mannheim.

2021 Two Mini-Lectures on ‘Vicarious Trauma’ and ‘Ethics’ in ‘Open Source Investigation for Academics’ a course of the Center of Digital Humanities and Social Science Research Methods Department run by the Center of Governance and Human Rights.

Current Flavia supervises Soc7 for the Sociology Department at Cambridge University

PhD Supervisor

Research Groups & Affiliations

Awards

DAAD Promos
PhD Scholarship of the Heinrich Böll Foundation

Additional Information

Flavia presented her paper "Between the Flesh and the Machine: Open Source Intelligence for Human-Rights Fact-Finding" from her MPhil dissertation at the conference "Critical Borders: Radical (Re)visions of AI" at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.

Job Title:
PhD Candidate, Sidney Sussex College
Flavia Saxler
Contact Information: