LOUP CELLARD
Loup Cellard just finished his PhD thesis in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, UK. Starting in September 2021, he will be a postdoctoral researcher working on the ecological regulation of algorithms in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society at Melbourne Law School. His research is situated in science and technology studies and materialist approaches to media studies, and focused on public sector digital transformation, data visualisation and inventive methods compounding science, art, design, and tech sensibilities.
His PhD thesis entitled “Theatres of Algorithmic Transparency: a post-digital ethnography” is an empirical fieldwork conducted in 2018 at Etalab, the French Open Data task force. As a researcher embedded in Etalab, Loup helped to organise design-based engagement events to elucidate social aspects of algorithmic transparency. This unique approach enabled him to formulate practice-based recommendations for the evaluation of public policies in the area of “algorithmic transparency,” taking into account both institutional constraints and democratic affordances of the politics of openness.
His commitment to shaping the field of policy innovation is evident in his authorship of a white-paper commissioned by the French Open Data task force, which was recently cited in the Automating Society Report 2020 by the advocacy organisation Algorithm Watch.
Loup has written on the politics of transparency devices for the critical theory journal Multitudes, and his methodological paper proposing a “post-digital ethnography of algorithms” is under review for a special issue of New Media & Society.
Prior to his PhD thesis, he worked as a data visualisation designer at the Medialab of Sciences-Po in Paris and the Digital Humanities Lab at EPFL, Lausanne. From 2011 to 2014 he was an editor of the French design criticism review Strabic, his involvement in this field continues through his role as a design educator supervising students at the industrial design school ENSCI-Les Ateliers.
