Wendy H. Wong
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
I am currently Professor of Political Science and Principal's Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan (located on Sylix Okanagan Nation Territory). I am the author of the award-winning book We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age, published by MIT Press . I have written two other award-winning books, Internal Affairs and The Authority Trap (with Sarah S. Stroup), both published by Cornell University Press. I have penned dozens of peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and have appeared in outlets such as the CBC, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, and The Conversation. I have been awarded grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, among other granting agencies.
I am honored to be a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. I am currently Faculty Affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI) at the University of Toronto. From 2008-2024, I was at the University of Toronto. When I left, I was Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Global Governance and Civil Society. I was an inaugural Research Lead at SRI from 2020-2022. From 2012-2017, I was Director of the Trudeau Center for Peace, Conflict, and Justice at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
My PhD is from the University of California, San Diego, a top political science program in the United States. I did my undergrad at UC Berkeley (GO BEARS!). My pro sports teams are the Lakers and Chargers. I definitely prefer the company of dogs over cats. If you want to work with me on any of the projects discussed on this website, feel free to contact me and introduce yourself. I am always keen to meet people with great ideas who want to work together on interesting projects!
Current Team
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Zahra Basiri
Zahra is a Master of Education student at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus, with a passion for education that spans 17 years. Holding a master's degree in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), she brings a wealth of experience to the classroom. Her commitment to student success extends beyond teaching; she thrives as an observer, material writer, and syllabus designer, all in pursuit of enhancing the learning journey.
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Naima Khan
Naima is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, majoring in Political Science and minoring in Law and Society. Her previous research includes investigations into South Asian and Middle Eastern governance structures, and particularly how there are wide gaps in the way that international law is implemented in developing states versus developed states.
Her interests in the field of law and the lack of cohesiveness in its applicability across borders has recently extended into a curiosity regarding the role of Artifical Intelligence in International Law and whether AI will bridge gaps in legal implementation or widen these gaps by creating platforms whose access is only restricted to developed states.
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Valérie Kindarji
Valérie is a PhD candidate at University of Toronto interested in international security. Her research focuses on the effects of disinformation on democracy. More specifically, using a combination of experiments and interviews, she seeks to understand how disinformation impacts democratic institutions, and how democracies respond to these growing threats.
Her research discusses faith in democratic institutions, platform governance, e-gov, and digital literacy initiatives. Her previous work on Canadian foreign policy and military intervention has been featured at WIIS Canada as part of the Emerging Thought Leaders programme. This research has also yielded a fellowship at the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict & Justice. Currently located in Montréal, her interests include horror movies, novels, dogs, and the great outdoors.
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Michael Monclou
Michael, a Colombian Latino, is currently a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on Global Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. His research centers on transitional justice, examining its power relations and the challenges related to land access.
With a background in Law and an MA in History, Michael has experience in various roles, including as a researcher, public official, and consultant in human rights, armed conflict, and victim reparations in Colombia. Additionally, he has served as a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. He is a drummer, walker, and science fiction lover.
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Alexandra Yao
Alexandra is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Political Science. Her research focuses on how governments use technology to expand state power, specifically state surveillance capacities. She is interested in how tech companies are shifting power politics on the global stage. She received her MA in European and Russian Affairs from the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, and is currently examining European democracies’ regulation of surveillance technologies. In her free time, she enjoys learning languages, playing chess, and swimming.
Alumni
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Sanjida Amin
Sanjida Amin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She studies peace and conflict with a focus on the civil wars in Sudan and South Sudan.
Her doctoral research explores how interstate rivalry can impact civil war processes such as peace negotiations, and organizational structure of rebel groups. Sanjida has conducted fieldwork in several locations (Khartoum, Addis Ababa and Nairobi) in Eastern Africa. Her research seeks to inform successful peacebuilding practices in other countries in Eastern Africa, and in the world. Sanjida is a Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice fellow in 2022, and a recipient of Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships in 2020. She is also the recipient of Ontario Graduate Scholarship in 2019. Prior to her doctoral studies, Sanjida completed her MA in Political Science at University of Toronto and worked for the provincial government as a Policy Analyst. -
Salar Asadolahi
Salar is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His research largely focuses on comparative welfare state policies, public opinion, and parties and elections.
His doctoral dissertation looks at the electoral politics of right-wing populism particularly as it relates to the Canadian case.
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Tanya Bandula-Irwin
Tanya is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto. Her research is on armed group taxation, armed group governance, and the political economy of civil wars.
Her dissertation focuses on the Philippines, though she also has extensive experience researching in and on Somalia. In addition to her doctoral studies, Tanya is a Doctoral Research Award Fellow at the International Development Research Centre of Canada and a Fellow at the Post-Conflict Reintegration Lab at the University of Toronto. Previously, she has done research on tax and governance in fragile contexts with the International Organization for Migration, the Danish Refugee Council, the International Centre for Tax and Development, and the World Bank. Her research has been published by the Journal of Eastern African Studies, PS: Political Science & Politics, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, UBC Press, and the International Centre for Tax and Development. -
Allison Cuttner
Allison is a Postdoctoral Fellow on the SSHRC-funded Governance Constellations project. In Fall 2023, Dr. Cuttner will be joining Emory University’s Department of Quantitative Theory and Methods as an Assistant Teaching Professor.
She completed her PhD in Political Science at Emory University in 2021. Her research focuses on elite and distributive politics in authoritarian regimes and developing democracies with an emphasis on formal theory and applied statistical methods.
Learn more about her research here: allisoncuttner.com
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Jamie Duncan
Jamie Duncan is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and a Junior Fellow at Massey College. He has written and spoken about the use of advanced technology in policing and border security, the political communications of public safety, as well as transparency and accountability in Canadian governance.
Jamie’s doctoral research focuses on processes of technology adoption and use in border security and is supported by a Canada Graduate Scholarship in Honour of Nelson Mandela. He is a researcher at the Centre for Access to Information and Justice at the University of Winnipeg as well as the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics. -
Dafna Dror-Shpoliansky
Dafna Dror-Shpoliansky is a human rights lawyer, and a Ph.D. candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is currently a visiting doctoral student at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Dafna's research focuses on human rights law in the digital age. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Dafna worked for six years as a legal counsel at the Office of the Deputy Attorney General of Israel (International Law Department), where she specialized in advising on international human rights law aspects regarding legislative procedures and supreme court proceedings, as well as reporting to the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies. Her recent publication, co-authored with Prof. Yuval Shany, "It’s the End of the (Offline) World as We Know It: From Human Rights to Digital Human Rights – A Proposed Typology", was recently published at the European Journal for International Law.
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Michael Faubert
Michael Faubert is a former University of TorontoPh.D. student and serves as Project Coordinator for the Global Registry of Non-Profit Data Sources (GRNDS). His academic research interests lie at the intersection of the History and Philosophy of Science & Technology and International Politics, focusing on the framing effects that different forms of evidence have on global policymaking. As a Toronto-based artist and illustrator, he is currently exploring the use of visual models, diagrams and illustrations in the historical and current practices of scientific communication.
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Amarpreet Kaur
Amarpreet Kaur is a Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies under sustainability theme at the University of British Columbia Okanagan (UBCO), in the Department of Economics. Her research investigates the impact of the environmental and neighborhood factors on house prices, specifically accounting for drinking water quality. Indeed, her work intends to highlight the influence and role of drinking water quality causing pricing disparities within the residential housing market.
Before pursuing her Ph.D., at UBCO, Amarpreet Kaur earned her MSc in Mathematics from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, India, in 2008. She subsequently completed her Ph.D. in Optimization from Thapar University, Patiala, India, in 2012 and worked as Assistant Professor at Central University of Punjab, Bathinda for around two years.
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E. Stefan Kehlenbach
E. Stefan Kehlenbach is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, and a co-director of the Governance of Emerging Technologies Group. Prior to his position at UAlbany, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD in Political Theory from UC Riverside in 2022.
His research focuses on the intersection of technology, power, and politics. Specifically, his work develops a new critical theory of big data, examining the impact that emerging technology has on conceptual frameworks of politics. Stefan’s research has appeared in Theory & Event and The Journal of Military Ethics. His public-facing work has appeared in the Washington Post and in APSA’s Educate blog.
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Yingqiu Kuang
Yingqiu Kuang earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia, specializing in the comparative and international political economy of East Asia. She will soon begin her postdoctoral research as the Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia at Stanford University.
Yingqiu’s substantive research interests are situated at the intersection of technology and innovation, power politics, and governance, focusing on Asia's role in the global governance of disruptive innovations. She is currently working on her first book project, titled “A Mosaic of Mundane Innovations: Emerging Powers, Multinational Firms, and Global 5G Technology Rules,” that examines the role of China and other East Asian states in the global governance of 5G communications technologies.
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Alex Martin
Alex Martin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science and a Junior Fellow and a researcher at Massey College.
Alex’s doctoral research is focused on the development of a genealogy of ‘explainability’ in the governance of AI systems in the Euro-Atlantic context, with a view towards exploring the shifting requirements of what is ‘owed’ to a citizen by government as explanation for decisions made with the intervention of an AI system (AIS). She has written and spoken about the limits of applying Habermasian definitions of justification as a institutional requirement for explaining AIS decisions, the individual responsibilization present in the design of digital literacy initiatives, as well as policy gaps in Canadian AI governance. Professionally, she served for three years as a Policy Analyst with the Department of Innovation, Science. And Economic Development’s Artificial Intelligence Hub where she has supported citizen deliberations on AI ethics and participated in negotiations for the formation of the Global Partnership on AI, an initiative by the G7 and OECD
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Alfred Oduro
Alfred Oduro is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where he studies African civil society, NGO membership in international organisations, global governance, pan-African norms, and politics of the African Union.
He is also part of the NGO Data and GRNDS research team, helping to understand how global civil society organizations are regulated in their respective states.
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Julian Posada
Julian Posada is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Yale University and a Faculty Fellow at the Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. As a writer and educator, his expertise lies in the intersection of technology, ethics, and society. His interdisciplinary research combines elements from information studies, sociology, and human-computer interaction to examine the relationship between human labor and data production in the artificial intelligence industry.
To learn more about his work, please visit:
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Takumi Shibaike
Takumi Shibaike is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Duke Kunshan University. Prior to Duke Kunshan, he held postdoctoral positions at the European University Institute and the University of Calgary.
He is interested in the role of small NGOs in global governance, especially in the areas of biodiversity and climate change. His research has appeared in Global Environmental Politics, Global Society, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, among other venues. For more information, visit his website:
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Victoria Vale
Victoria is the Project Manager for Wendy’s Research Team and a former Research Assistant for the Functional Governance project. She graduated with High Distinction from the University of Toronto in June 2021 with an Honours Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Political Science.
Victoria’s senior thesis was titled “Violent Disruptors or Service Providers? Re-Evaluating Houthi Rebel Interactions with Humanitarian Aid Operations in Yemen.”