Güneş joined the Department of Digital Humanities in 2019 as ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow and is currently Lecturer in Digital Infrastructures and Sustainability. She earned her PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, where her research focused on (open) data-driven practices, initiatives, and discourses in the context of smart city planning in London. Her current research sits at the intersection of digital technologies, environmental justice, urban ecology and app studies. Specifically, she examines the epistemological and infrastructural implications of digital apps, data, and machine learning technologies in the context of urban ecology.

Previously, Güneş worked at a civil society organisation in Istanbul where she carried out policy research on ICTs, digital innovation, e-government and social media. Following that, she led projects on digital surveillance, censorship and freedom of speech in Turkey, which included preparing country reports for the Association for Progressive Communications. She has also written about the state of data technologies in Turkey for Computer Weekly and on social media and freedom of expression for Open Democracy.

Teaching

Güneş has taught across different subjects including technology and development, urban media and mediated urban, digital cultures, digital economy, critical data studies and theoretical approaches in media studies.

Research interests

My current research interests are:

• Critical Data Studies
• Environmental Justice
• Political Economy of Data Technologies
• Critical App Studies
• Datafication of Urban infrastructure
• Electronic Waste

I welcome PhD inquiries in these areas, especially those that incorporate feminist and/or decolonial perspectives.

Selected Publications

• Tavmen, G. (2024). “Open data means business”: Infrastructural and economic implications of opening up data in smart London. Digital Geography and Society.
• Wang, Y. and Tavmen, G. (2024) ‘New outlets of digital feminist activism in China: the #SeeFemaleWorkers campaign’, Feminist Media Studies, pp. 1–17. doi: 10.1080/14680777.2024.2334782.
• Tavmen, G. (2023) Cybernetic Urbanism: Tracing the Development of the Responsibilized Subject and Self-Organizing Communities in Smart Cities, in Mackinnon D, Fast V, Burns R (eds), Digital (In)justice in the Smart City, University of Toronto Press.
• Tavmen, G. (2020) Data/Infrastructure in the Smart City: Understanding the Infrastructural Power of Citymapper App through Technicity of Data, Big Data & Society.
• Tavmen, G. & Chakraborti, S. (2017) Interview with Etienne Balibar: on democracy, oppression and universality, London: Birkbeck for the Humanities Blog & Verso Books Blog.
• Tavmen, G. (2014) Internet rights that went wrong in Turkey (Special Country Report), Association for Progressive Communications.