Caitlyn McGeer focuses on the use of artificial intelligence and social media in conflict settings in Africa. Caitlyn specializes in anticipatory action for conflict prevention and hate speech and disinformation in conflicts. Her research interests deal with gender and technology, human rights, and security.
Caitlyn holds a DPhil in Criminology from the University of Oxford, where she worked in Nigeria and the UK to assess how law enforcement agencies operationalize the United Nations protocols on trafficking in persons and the smuggling of migrants. Caitlyn currently lectures at the University of Toronto on topics related to criminology and sociology and has previously lectured at the University of Oxford on qualitative and quantitative methods.
Beyond academia, Caitlyn’s professional background centers on capacity building premised on securing welfare and rights protections. She is a strategic development and impact assessment specialist. Caitlyn has worked extensively on both local, national, and transnational-level projects, including ones in the UK, Canada, Guatemala, Ghana, and Ecuador. She has held senior management and front-line roles for various non-governmental, governmental, and United Nations entities.
Benedetta Zocchi is interested on migrants’ experiences of mobility and deportability across borders and on how such experiences interact with local spaces, histories, and agencies. In the context of the ConflictNet project, Benedetta focuses on the impact of ICT and social media on migrants’ livelihoods, and on issues of transnational justice affecting migrants in Africa.
Before joining the University of Oxford, Benedetta was a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar and a Teaching Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Her Ph.D. thesis theorizes frontier-making as an approach to the study of prolonged assemblages of subaltern agencies, histories and subjectivities emerging with migrants’ immobilisations in Europe’s peripheries. During her time at QMUL, she delivered teaching on a variety of undergraduate modules in the School of Politics and IR and obtained the Associate Fellowship of Advance Higher Education.
Benedetta’s research has been published in edited books and peer-review articles and across different media platforms including news magazines, podcasts, film festivals, conferences, and photo exhibitions.