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Speakers and people involved in the Unlike Us Limassol event.

Rasha Allam is an International Media Expert and a visiting Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, the American University in Cairo. Allam is a specialist in Media Management with a specific reference on Broadcast Media Regulations. She serves on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Social Studies and the Journal of Telecommunication and Information Technology. Allam’s research interests include Egyptian and Arab media systems, Arab Press Laws and Arab Broadcast Media Laws and Regulations

Achilles Peklaris was born and raised in Athens’ downtown in 1973 and studied Communication in Coventry, UK. His official profession since 1995 is journalism, but so far he has worked in several different fields – from speechwriter for politicians and political analyst to kibbutz farm worker and from beach bar manager to spokesman for a Publishing House. After 10 years of reporting on greek politics, as a staffer for several nationwide publications and radio stations, and 2 years in NYC covering the aftermath of 9/11, he started travelling. He lived in London, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Belgrade and Pristina, corresponding regularly for Greeceʼs most established newspaper, “Kathimerini”, as well as for his hometown free press city bible, “Athens Voice” and many other publications.

Christopher Kyriakides was born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland. He holds a PhD in Sociology and Politics from the University of Glasgow and is a former Research Fellow of the Centre for Research into Racism, Ethnicity and Nationalism, University of Glasgow and of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, University of Bristol. He is currently Assistant Professor and Director of Ethnicity and Communications Research (ETHCOM), Department of Communication and Internet Studies, Cyprus University of Technology and is a Research Associate of the University of California, Irvine. As a Political Sociologist of Ethnicity and Communication, Dr Kyriakides has published widely with papers in each of the consistently ranked top three international peer-reviewed journals in Ethnic Studies – Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Ethnicity and Health. Substantive areas of interest focus on both macro and micro dynamics of ethnicity and communication.

D.E Wittkower is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University, where he teaches courses on philosophy of technology, computer ethics, and information literacy. He holds a Ph.D from Vanderbilt University, where his training concentrated on German philosophy and the history of value theory (ethics, aesthetics, social/political philosophy). His research has focused on Philosophy of Technology and Applied Philosophy—exploring the intersection of New Media Theory, Political Philosophy, Ethics, and 19th and 20th century Continental and American philosophy. Relevant publications include “A Provisional Phenomenology of the Audiobook,” in Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, Matthew Rubery ed.; “Mind-Mapping Inside and Outside of the Classroom,” Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy, Trebor Scholz ed.; “On the Wrongfulness of Strong Copyright in E-Business,” in Ethical Issues in E-Business, Daniel Palmer ed.; Facebook and Philosophy, D.E. Wittkower ed.; and iPod and Philosophy, D.E. Wittkower ed

Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the WissenschaftskollegBerlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007)

Korinna Patelis has been researching the sociocultural structures of new media for nearly 15 years. She read Philosophy and Politics at Warwick University and has a Masters in Media and Communications, from Goldsmiths College. Her PhD, supervised by J. Curran and completed at Goldsmiths in 2000 was on the Political Economy of the Internet, which is also the subject of her early publications. Korinna has been working in new media as well as teaching new media for more than a decade mostly in Greece, and joined the Department of Communication and Internet Studies at the Cyprus University of Technology, as an assistant professor in September 2009. Her research interests currently focus around the web’s commercial taxonomy, the representational structures of web sites and the power of social media. Her research is interdisciplinary and struggles with methodological issues arising from approaching software as culture. Her current writing explores social media as social text using the example of Facebook. Attempting to refashion a radical political economy perspective in new media research, the politics of the internet as well as its regulation lie at the heart of Korinna’s research interests in and outside the academy.

Marc Stumpel is a Dutch new media researcher and blogger for the Unlike Us website. He holds a MA degree in New Media and Culture from the University of Amsterdam (2009-2010). His main research interest is the antagonism within the political and economic dimensions of digital culture, especially in relation to social media. Being a privacy/user-control advocate, he is concerned with the development of alternative social networking spaces and techniques. He is involved in the FB Resistance project and has written his master’s dissertation the Politics of Social Media, focussing on Facebook.

Martha Michailidou is a lecturer in the Department of Communications, Media and Culture at Panteio University, Athens. She studied Sociology and Philosophy at City University, London, and went on to do an MA in Media and Communications and a PhD in Sociology and Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has taught at the Department of Sociology at the University of Crete and at the department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, and has collaborated as a researcher with the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE) in Athens. Her research and teaching interests include the relations between the production of culture, cultural consumption and the government of populations; media work in creative industries; methods of media and communications research

Oliver Leistert is a media researcher. His main research interests are mobile media, social media, surveillance media, and protest media. Currently he finishes his thesis “mobile media and dataveillance” as a research fellow at the Center for Media and Communication Studies, CEU, Budapest. Together with Theo Röhle he recently co-edited “Generation Facebook“,the first collected volume of critical media studies about Facebook in German.

Pavlos Chatzopoulos holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He is currently the editor of online journal Re-public and a research fellow at the Center for Gender Studies at Panteion University-Athens, working on a 3 year research project on Gender, Migration, and Digital Networks. He has published several articles on space/time, urban social movements, has co-edited the volume Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile (Palgrave, 2003) and has authored the book The Balkans beyond Nationalism and Identity (IB Tauris, 2007).

Rasha Allam Nabil Mohamed Gamaledin

Robert W. Gehl received a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University in 2010. He is currently an assistant professor of new media in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. His research draws on science and technology studies, political economy, and critical/cultural studies and focuses on the intersections between social media, computer networking, and software studies. He has published research that critiques the architecture, code, culture, and design of social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and blogs in The International Journal of Cultural Studies, New Media and Society, Television and New Media, First Monday, and Social Text (forthcoming). He is currently working on a book on the architecture and political economy of social media. At Utah, he teaches courses in communication technology, composition in new media, and political economy of communication.

Sara Hamdy El Khalili

Vasilis Kostakis (PhD, MA, MSc) is a research fellow at Tallinn University of Technology, a business consultant, a collaborator of P2P Foundation and has served as an external advisor to the office of the Greek Prime Minister on e-governance (2009-2010). Moreover, he is the author of three literature books in Greek. His research interests focus on the investigation of the political economy of information production in the Web and more in particular on examining the potential of the concepts of Commons-based peer production and peer governance. This academic year he studies the synergies of 3-D printing and small-scale manufacturing with peer production.