Gijs van Maanen

Gijs van Maanen is a postdoctoral researcher working at the Faculty of Law, Economics, and Governance, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His postdoc is situated within Nadya Purtova’s INFO-LEG project, which aims to explore various different data governance models, with a focus on economic ones, and their capacity to protect ourselves against data-driven harms.

As a Fellow at HIIG, he will look specifically into the concept of data commons, within three domains: smart cities, smart grids, and online advertisement. Please get in touch if you are interested in the relationship between any of these domains, and that of the data common!

Next to his work on conceptualizing data as an economic resource, and the interrelated governance models, he has papers under review on AI ethics washing, algorithmic representation, and methodologies to study data in practice. Together with Jonathan Gray, he is composing a Field Guide to Public Data, as part of the Public Data Lab.

He is involved in a research project on the effects of private funding on academic research and academic freedom, funded by the Young Academy, under supervision of Prof. dr. Linnet Taylor. Research report to be published in the beginning of 2022.

Van Maanen has a background in history and political philosophy, and for his PhD conducted ethnographic research on open government and open data practices in the Netherlands. His PhD will be submitted in the beginning of 2022. In 2019, he was a visiting scholar at the Centre of Interdisciplinary Methodologies of the University of Warwick (UK), where he worked together with Prof. Dr. Noortje Marres on, among other things, the relationship between philosophy and empirical research (or: ‘empirical philosophy’).