Tamara Shepherd
Biographic Data
| ID | 4209352 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tamara Shepherd |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tamara |
| FAMILY NAME | Shepherd |
| SIGNATURE | SHEPHERD T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Calgary |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Policy Portal 5: Intersectionality and Inclusion in Digital Policy: Policy Processes, Interventions, and Reflections
Policy Portal 5: Intersectionality and Inclusion in Digital Policy: Intersectional Critiques of AI Governance
The Canadian Clearview AI Investigation as a Call for Digital Policy Literacy
In 2020, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPCC) led a joint federal-provincial investigation into privacy violations stemming from the use of facial recognition technologies. The investigation was prompted specifically by the mobilization of Clearview AI’s facial recognition software in law enforcement, including by regional police services as well as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Clearview AI’s technology is based on scrapi…
Platforms and Power: A Panel Discussion
Background This article is based on a panel discussion at McMaster University in 2019. Analysis Five questions are posed: 1) What is pressing about research on platforms and power right now? 2) What is the most powerful example of a research design that could disrupt or transform platform power? 3) Can platforms and algorithms be liberating? 4) How can researchers and policymakers work together for change? 5) What regulatory futures should resear…
Digital Literacy in Digital Strategy
This article discusses the role of digital literacy as a digital strategy policy goal in Canada. It reviews previous framings of digital literacy and suggests how they could be broadened to avoid an overly superficial treatment of Canadians’ negotiation of digital culture and policymaking
Discursive Legitimation in the Cultures of Internet Policymaking
A socio-technical lens on the development of the Internet suggests that policymaking plays a constitutive role in the meanings of technology and its uses. In the Canadian context, I trace how early “information society” discourses underlying negative policy strategies continued into current discursive legitimations of the Internet as essential communications infrastructure. The federal regulator’s 2015–2016 Review of Basic Telecommunications Serv…
Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’
This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-to-day basis in the context of pressures to efficiently produce monetizable ‘deliverables.’ Using a political economy of communication framework and an iterative methodological approach, the authors mobilize examples drawn from a collaborative set of activities they …
When passion isn’t enough: Gender, affect and credibility in digital games design
Recent controversies around identity and diversity in digital games culture indicate the heightened affective terrain for participants within this creative industry. While work in digital games production has been characterized as a form of passionate, affective labour, this article examines its specificities as a constraining and enabling force. Affect, particularly passion, serves to render forms of game development oriented towards professiona…
Information Ownership and Materiality in an Age of Big Data Surveillance
Can private data “havens,” localized servers, and offline infrastructure empower secure and private user control over data? Contrasting Sealand's counter-surveillance policies with the NSA's Utah Data Center mass surveillance apparatus, the authors analyze how control of the physical location of data centers shapes the possibilities of data agency and ownership. They note that to whom data belongs has become regulated asymmetrically through techn…
Histories of Hating
This roundtable discussion presents a dialogue between digital culture scholars on the seemingly increased presence of hating and hate speech online. Revolving primarily around the recent #GamerGate campaign of intensely misogynistic discourse aimed at women in video games, the discussion suggests that the current moment for hate online needs to be situated historically. From the perspective of intersecting cultural histories of hate speech, disc…
Mapped, Measured, and Mined: The Social Graph and Colonial Visuality
This manifesto argues that the social graph and its associated contemporary surveillance economies might be situated within a longstanding colonial tradition of harnessing visuality for control and profit
A Tale of Two Regulators: Telecom Policy Participation in Canada
What are the challenges to effective academic participation in telecommunications policymaking? In this article, the authors analyze their experiences with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and Industry Canada as examples. Their goal is to increase academic policy engagement despite negligible government support for public interest advocacy, as traditional public interest values are discarded by regulators because ne…
Viewing youth and mobile privacy through a digital policy literacy framework
Digital policy literacy is a critical element of digital literacy that emphasizes an understanding of communication policy processes, the political economy of media, and technological infrastructures. This paper introduces an analytical framework of digital policy literacy and applies it to young people’s everyday negotiations of mobile privacy, in order to argue for increased policy literacy around privacy and mobile phone communication. The fra…
Young Canadians’ Apprenticeship Labour in User-Generated Content
This article introduces a political-economic framework for analyzing young people’s production of user-generated content (UGC) as a kind of apprenticeship labour. Based on case studies of four young Montréalers engaged in creating user-generated content, the author developed the apprenticeship-type model of UGC labour to denote a process by which online immaterial labour or “free labour” coincides with self-directed and informal job training, cha…
Technology design and power: Freedom and control in communication networks
The design of technologies with particular sets of affordances for user action reflects and embeds particular sociopolitical values in the technological artefacts themselves. In relation to networked communication technologies like the Internet, design values of openness and decentralization accord with the hegemonic value of freedom as an inherently positive social and political concept. Yet freedom is also an elastic concept that contains the p…
Persona Rights for User-Generated Content: A Normative Framework for Privacy and Intellectual Property Regulation
This article introduces the term “persona rights” as a normative conceptual framework for analyzing the language of regulatory debates around privacy and intellectual property online, mainly from a Canadian perspective. In using the concept of persona rights to interrogate and critique the current limitations of regulatory discourses in protecting user rights online, the legal implications of persona rights law are translated into more conceptual…
Rotten Tomatoes in the Field of Popular Cultural Production
Rotten Tomatoes est un site Internet qui rassemble des critiques de films de sources journalistiques et non professionnelles et qui offre des ressources complètes aussi bien pour l’utilisateur ordinaire que pour le mordu de cinéma. Cet article examine comment Rotten Tomatoes fonctionne comme un exemple de critique cinématographique « en ligne » dans un champ de production de la culture populaire. Rotten Tomatoes se situe aussi bien à l’intérieur …
When passion isn’t enough: Gender, affect and credibility in digital games design
Recent controversies around identity and diversity in digital games culture indicate the heightened affective terrain for participants within this creative industry. While work in digital games production has been characterized as a form of passionate, affective labour, this article examines its specificities as a constraining and enabling force. Affect, particularly passion, serves to render forms of game development oriented towards professiona…
Histories of Hating
This roundtable discussion presents a dialogue between digital culture scholars on the seemingly increased presence of hating and hate speech online. Revolving primarily around the recent #GamerGate campaign of intensely misogynistic discourse aimed at women in video games, the discussion suggests that the current moment for hate online needs to be situated historically. From the perspective of intersecting cultural histories of hate speech, disc…
Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’
This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-to-day basis in the context of pressures to efficiently produce monetizable ‘deliverables.’ Using a political economy of communication framework and an iterative methodological approach, the authors mobilize examples drawn from a collaborative set of activities they …
Mapped, Measured, and Mined: The Social Graph and Colonial Visuality
This manifesto argues that the social graph and its associated contemporary surveillance economies might be situated within a longstanding colonial tradition of harnessing visuality for control and profit
Information Ownership and Materiality in an Age of Big Data Surveillance
Can private data “havens,” localized servers, and offline infrastructure empower secure and private user control over data? Contrasting Sealand's counter-surveillance policies with the NSA's Utah Data Center mass surveillance apparatus, the authors analyze how control of the physical location of data centers shapes the possibilities of data agency and ownership. They note that to whom data belongs has become regulated asymmetrically through techn…
Rotten Tomatoes in the Field of Popular Cultural Production
Rotten Tomatoes est un site Internet qui rassemble des critiques de films de sources journalistiques et non professionnelles et qui offre des ressources complètes aussi bien pour l’utilisateur ordinaire que pour le mordu de cinéma. Cet article examine comment Rotten Tomatoes fonctionne comme un exemple de critique cinématographique « en ligne » dans un champ de production de la culture populaire. Rotten Tomatoes se situe aussi bien à l’intérieur …
A Tale of Two Regulators: Telecom Policy Participation in Canada
What are the challenges to effective academic participation in telecommunications policymaking? In this article, the authors analyze their experiences with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and Industry Canada as examples. Their goal is to increase academic policy engagement despite negligible government support for public interest advocacy, as traditional public interest values are discarded by regulators because ne…
The Canadian Clearview AI Investigation as a Call for Digital Policy Literacy
In 2020, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPCC) led a joint federal-provincial investigation into privacy violations stemming from the use of facial recognition technologies. The investigation was prompted specifically by the mobilization of Clearview AI’s facial recognition software in law enforcement, including by regional police services as well as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Clearview AI’s technology is based on scrapi…
Discursive Legitimation in the Cultures of Internet Policymaking
A socio-technical lens on the development of the Internet suggests that policymaking plays a constitutive role in the meanings of technology and its uses. In the Canadian context, I trace how early “information society” discourses underlying negative policy strategies continued into current discursive legitimations of the Internet as essential communications infrastructure. The federal regulator’s 2015–2016 Review of Basic Telecommunications Serv…
Technology design and power: Freedom and control in communication networks
The design of technologies with particular sets of affordances for user action reflects and embeds particular sociopolitical values in the technological artefacts themselves. In relation to networked communication technologies like the Internet, design values of openness and decentralization accord with the hegemonic value of freedom as an inherently positive social and political concept. Yet freedom is also an elastic concept that contains the p…
Rotten Tomatoes in the Field of Popular Cultural Production
Rotten Tomatoes est un site Internet qui rassemble des critiques de films de sources journalistiques et non professionnelles et qui offre des ressources complètes aussi bien pour l’utilisateur ordinaire que pour le mordu de cinéma. Cet article examine comment Rotten Tomatoes fonctionne comme un exemple de critique cinématographique « en ligne » dans un champ de production de la culture populaire. Rotten Tomatoes se situe aussi bien à l’intérieur …
Persona Rights for User-Generated Content: A Normative Framework for Privacy and Intellectual Property Regulation
This article introduces the term “persona rights” as a normative conceptual framework for analyzing the language of regulatory debates around privacy and intellectual property online, mainly from a Canadian perspective. In using the concept of persona rights to interrogate and critique the current limitations of regulatory discourses in protecting user rights online, the legal implications of persona rights law are translated into more conceptual…
Viewing youth and mobile privacy through a digital policy literacy framework
Digital policy literacy is a critical element of digital literacy that emphasizes an understanding of communication policy processes, the political economy of media, and technological infrastructures. This paper introduces an analytical framework of digital policy literacy and applies it to young people’s everyday negotiations of mobile privacy, in order to argue for increased policy literacy around privacy and mobile phone communication. The fra…
Young Canadians’ Apprenticeship Labour in User-Generated Content
This article introduces a political-economic framework for analyzing young people’s production of user-generated content (UGC) as a kind of apprenticeship labour. Based on case studies of four young Montréalers engaged in creating user-generated content, the author developed the apprenticeship-type model of UGC labour to denote a process by which online immaterial labour or “free labour” coincides with self-directed and informal job training, cha…
Technology design and power: Freedom and control in communication networks
The design of technologies with particular sets of affordances for user action reflects and embeds particular sociopolitical values in the technological artefacts themselves. In relation to networked communication technologies like the Internet, design values of openness and decentralization accord with the hegemonic value of freedom as an inherently positive social and political concept. Yet freedom is also an elastic concept that contains the p…
A Tale of Two Regulators: Telecom Policy Participation in Canada
What are the challenges to effective academic participation in telecommunications policymaking? In this article, the authors analyze their experiences with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and Industry Canada as examples. Their goal is to increase academic policy engagement despite negligible government support for public interest advocacy, as traditional public interest values are discarded by regulators because ne…
Information Ownership and Materiality in an Age of Big Data Surveillance
Can private data “havens,” localized servers, and offline infrastructure empower secure and private user control over data? Contrasting Sealand's counter-surveillance policies with the NSA's Utah Data Center mass surveillance apparatus, the authors analyze how control of the physical location of data centers shapes the possibilities of data agency and ownership. They note that to whom data belongs has become regulated asymmetrically through techn…
Histories of Hating
This roundtable discussion presents a dialogue between digital culture scholars on the seemingly increased presence of hating and hate speech online. Revolving primarily around the recent #GamerGate campaign of intensely misogynistic discourse aimed at women in video games, the discussion suggests that the current moment for hate online needs to be situated historically. From the perspective of intersecting cultural histories of hate speech, disc…
Mapped, Measured, and Mined: The Social Graph and Colonial Visuality
This manifesto argues that the social graph and its associated contemporary surveillance economies might be situated within a longstanding colonial tradition of harnessing visuality for control and profit
Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’
This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-to-day basis in the context of pressures to efficiently produce monetizable ‘deliverables.’ Using a political economy of communication framework and an iterative methodological approach, the authors mobilize examples drawn from a collaborative set of activities they …
When passion isn’t enough: Gender, affect and credibility in digital games design
Recent controversies around identity and diversity in digital games culture indicate the heightened affective terrain for participants within this creative industry. While work in digital games production has been characterized as a form of passionate, affective labour, this article examines its specificities as a constraining and enabling force. Affect, particularly passion, serves to render forms of game development oriented towards professiona…
Discursive Legitimation in the Cultures of Internet Policymaking
A socio-technical lens on the development of the Internet suggests that policymaking plays a constitutive role in the meanings of technology and its uses. In the Canadian context, I trace how early “information society” discourses underlying negative policy strategies continued into current discursive legitimations of the Internet as essential communications infrastructure. The federal regulator’s 2015–2016 Review of Basic Telecommunications Serv…
Digital Literacy in Digital Strategy
This article discusses the role of digital literacy as a digital strategy policy goal in Canada. It reviews previous framings of digital literacy and suggests how they could be broadened to avoid an overly superficial treatment of Canadians’ negotiation of digital culture and policymaking
Platforms and Power: A Panel Discussion
Background This article is based on a panel discussion at McMaster University in 2019. Analysis Five questions are posed: 1) What is pressing about research on platforms and power right now? 2) What is the most powerful example of a research design that could disrupt or transform platform power? 3) Can platforms and algorithms be liberating? 4) How can researchers and policymakers work together for change? 5) What regulatory futures should resear…
The Canadian Clearview AI Investigation as a Call for Digital Policy Literacy
In 2020, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPCC) led a joint federal-provincial investigation into privacy violations stemming from the use of facial recognition technologies. The investigation was prompted specifically by the mobilization of Clearview AI’s facial recognition software in law enforcement, including by regional police services as well as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Clearview AI’s technology is based on scrapi…
Policy Portal 5: Intersectionality and Inclusion in Digital Policy: Policy Processes, Interventions, and Reflections
Policy Portal 5: Intersectionality and Inclusion in Digital Policy: Intersectional Critiques of AI Governance
Political science (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Public relations (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Social Media and Politics (7 works) · Politics (5 works) · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection (5 works) · Psychology (5 works)