Marianne Franklin –  Faculty SWING 2025

#MeetOurFaculty! SWING features scholars and international experts on Internet Governance. Get ready for an enriching learning experience.

Prof. Marianne Franklin

In 2023 she was appointed Chair of Media, Cultural Industries and Society at the University of Groningen (NL), previously Chair of Global Media and Politics at Goldsmiths University (UK). With degrees (majors in History, Music, PhD in International Relations) and research funding from the Arts and Humanities as well as the Social Sciences, she deploys multidisciplinary and multi-sited ethnographic methodologies in my research. The aim is twofold: (1) to demystify the techno-economic determinism underpinning public and policy debates that put digitalization – the role of “Big Tech”, “Big Data”, and R&D into Artificial Intelligence – as the driving force of all sociocultural, political and economic transformations. (2) to challenge the Global North settings in which these debates take place and their implications for public policy, public culture and the arts.

Former Chair of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet), the UN-based Internet Rights and Principles Coalition of the Internet Governance Forum, founding Editor on OpenDemocracy of the Human Rights and the Internet series, and member of the Digital Constitutionalism Network/Teaching Partnership, she has been active in negotiating digital human rights agendas for sustainable internet futures in national, regional, and global policy-making spaces.