Overview
Loup Cellard is an ethnographer and design researcher working in the tradition of science & technology studies (STS) and materialist approaches to media studies. His research focused on algorithms and data centres. He joined the ADM+S Centre in June 2021 as Postdoctoral research fellow studying the ecological impacts and regulation of Automated Decision-Makings.
In February 2021 Loup finished his PhD thesis in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, UK. Entitled “Theatres of Algorithmic Transparency: a post-digital ethnography”, this research 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 cited in the Automating Society Report 2020 by the advocacy organisation Algorithm Watch.
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.