Postdoctoral Researcher Data Technologies and Practices (0.8 - 1.0 FTE)

The Montaigne Centre for Rule of Law and Administration of Justice at the Utrecht School of Law, Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance, is looking for a postdoctoral Researcher for the ERC-funded project INFO-LEG to study data practices and technologies with a view to fundamentally restructure legal protection against information-driven harms. 

The Postdoc will be supervised by the PI of the project, Prof. Nadya Purtova. and embedded at the  Montaigne Centre for Rule of Law and Administration of Justice. The project's aim is to reinvent the current system of legal protection against negative effects of the data-driven harms. In Europe this system is currently embodied in the data protection law (such as the GDPR) and is centered around the notion of personal data: the assumption is that if collection and use of personal data are regulated, information technology related harms will be averted. Yet, using the concept of personal data as a trigger is not without problems. The boundary between personal and non-personal data is increasingly unclear. Modern data collection and processing, as well as the growing spread of their uses across societal contexts (e.g. reliance on data and AI in public and private decision making) lead to a situation where any information can be personal data. Anchoring legal protection against digital harms in the 'personal data' concept is a legacy of legislative choices made in the past. Alternative ways of structuring legal protection are needed and possible. Given the broad meaning of personal data, a growing range of situations and problems falls within the ambit of data protection law, which is not equipped to deal with all of them equally well. Simply narrowing down the concept of personal data would not do (where should we (re)draw the line?). The problem requires fundamental rethinking of the current approach to legal protection. The project looks to suggest alternative avenues for legal protection which are not subject to the concept of personal data. We are looking for alternative ideas, concepts, or principles that would allow the restructuring of legal protection. At the moment we are exploring data commons and other approaches to understand the relationship between data and society, such as understanding it as ‘infrastructure’ (e.g. Bowker & Star, 1999), as ‘infosphere’, (e.g. Floridi, 2014), or as ‘data ecosystem/‘information ecology’ (e.g. Baker & Bowker, 2007; Tamar & Federica, 2019). We are interested in data power and what characterizes computing as a social practice, which is highly preliminary. Other approaches and ideas are more than welcome.

As our Postdoc you will contribute to the project by studying data and information technologies and practices from the perspective of your own discipline. You will conduct theoretical research and the empirical study of data and information technologies and practices in 3 contexts: online advertising, smart grid and smart cities. You will have a significant degree of freedom to shape your 'sub-project' as long as it serves the objectives of the ERC project.