Dr. Burcu Baykurt

Burcu Baykurt is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her project at the Weizenbaum-Institut examines the rise of “gov-tech” (government technologies) companies in the United States. Specifically, it focuses on how the techniques and politics of capture (grabbing and parsing through vast amounts of existing government datasets) create a new kind of market and transform statecraft.

Her research in general examines the social and cultural dimensions of media and technology. From smart cities to Covid-19 dashboards to predictive technologies in border control, her work takes a critical approach towards understanding how data-intensive technologies reshape and perpetuate durable inequalities. Her work has been published in scholarly journals such as Big Data & Society, New Media & Society, Convergence, and the Journal of Political Power among others.

She has a Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University and has been a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies and the Academy of International Affairs NRW in Germany.