Randi Heinrichs

Randi Heinrichs is a postdoc at the Center for Digital Cultures at the Leuphana University Luneburg in the research project 'Smartness as Wealth'. She has a background in cultural studies with a specialization in critical data studies. Her research interests, teaching and writing focus on power relations, social practices and technical conditions that shape our politics of knowledge in digital cultures. In this context, she researches topics such as digital twins, personalization, anonymity, whistleblowing, data discrimination and web archiving. 

Her dissertation on anonymity, social media platforms and (data) neighborhoods, which she successfully completed in 2023, combines ethnography, archival exploration with media and cultural theory. 

In 2022, she received the Canadian MITACS award for emerging scholars for international collaboration in the research network 'Desegregating Network Neighborhoods', which examines the urban history of algorithms, led by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Laura Kurgan. She is an alumna of the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group at UC Berkeley, and an affiliate of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University as well of the research project DALOSS at the University of Copenhagen.

Since 2024 she serves as one of the managing editors of the open access journal ephemera. theory and politics of organization.