Lonneke van der Velden is Assistant Professor Global Digital Cultures at the University of Amsterdam. Her work centres around issues of datafication, surveillance, digital inequalities, and responses by social movements and civil society. She teaches at the Media Studies Department.

Lonneke contributes to the Global Digital Cultures (GDC) Research Priority Area via a (GDC funded) seed-grant project Data Publics and the Information Front: An Analysis of Open Source Cultures Investigating Russia’s War on Ukraine. She is part of the editorial board of Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy.

From 2015-2021 she was postdoctoral researcher with DATACTIVE, an ERC funded research project that investigated the politics of data according to civil society.

In her dissertation “Surveillance as Public Matter” she studied on how surveillance can be traced and made visible. The thesis shows how (activist) projects attempt to datafy surveillance processes and turn them into a public resource.

Lonneke engages with various tech, art and civil society networks outside of the university. She has contributed to Unlike Us, a network that invested in theorizing and developing alternative social media (INC, 2012-2013), and served on the board of directors of the Dutch Digital Rights organization Bits of Freedom (2012-2020; Chair 2016-2020).