Dr Yung Au

Yung Au is a visiting OTF Senior ICFP Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. She leads a number of research projects on the surveillance industrial complex, critical mapping methods, and data infrastructures.

In her current fellowship, she works with several partner organisations to examine ways of mapping the elusive supply chain of surveillance technologies. Part of this work includes interrogating the legislative challenges of governing these trade, policing, and colonial relations that spill across multiple jurisdictions — and even into outer space. 

Yung is also a Board Member of the Surveillance in the Majority World Network and holds a AI & Market Power Fellowship supported by the European Artificial Intelligence & Society Fund, Open Society Foundation, and Institute of International Education. As part of this fellowship, she co-leads a project called ‘The Political Economy of Military General-Purpose AI Systems’.

Yung holds a DPhil from Oxford where her project examined the colonial commodification of state surveillance by exploring the marketplace of data-driven technologies using abolitionist frameworks. Interrogating in particular the export of surveillance technologies from the west to the Global Majority world, this work analyses the power dynamic undergirding these set of processes and infrastructures. She was also the Principal Investigator of ‘Stories in/around the Machine’, a project exploring the entanglement of algorithmic systems in the rhythms of informal work and life in Asia. This includes the surveillance implications that arise from different types of datafied urban landscapes. By engaging a network of workers, unions, researchers, and artists in the region, this project teases out tales of troubles, tinkering, and trickeries of living with such technologies. She has authored several award winning academic papers as well as public pieces and creative work on surveillance, maps, data infrastructures, abolition, and the intersection of technology and urban life.

Yung was also previously an Academic Tutor at the University of Oxford and an Associate Lecturer at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London. She has taught on modules on “Politics & Technology”, “Intersectional Internets”, “Surveillance Futures”, and “Human Rights & Computation” and supervised final projects of MA and MSC students.

Yung’s current research fellowship at the Geography Department continues her examination of the surveillance industrial complex in collaboration with partner organisations situated at different parts of the surveillance technology supply chain. This project charts out different ways to map and visualise the surveillance supply chain  alongside collaborators. This work also examines the legislative challenges relating to the uncertain geographies of surveillance and the many points of cross-border solidarity along these convoluted supply chains that span many geographies. Parallel to this work, Yung is also co-leading on a project on ‘The Political Economy of Military General-Purpose AI Systems’ as part of her fellowship on AI & Market Power. This project examines the urgent implications of military AI and the use of data infrastructures to occupy territory.

Peer-Reviewed Articles & Book Chapters

• Au, Y. (2023) The sprint to plug in the moon. In, C. Cath (ed.) Eaten by the Internet. Meatspace Press. pp. 27–34.
• Herasimenka, A., Au, Y., Bright, J., George, A., Knuutila, A., Joynes-Burgess, K., and Howard, P. (2023) The political economy of digital profiteering: Communication resource mobilization by anti-vaccination actors. Journal of Communication, 73(2): 126–137.
• Au, Y. (2022) Data Centres on the Moon and Other Stories: A Volumetric and Elemental Analysis of the Coloniality of Digital Infrastructures. Special Issue on Earthly Volumes, Voluminous Materialities: Working with Apprehension, edited by Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds. Territory, Politics, Governance, 12(1): 12–30. * Winner of the Decolonial Scholarship Award & Best Student Paper Award at ICA. 2023.
• Au, Y. (2022) Platforming Hong Kong: A City of Alternatives. Special Issue on Digital Platforms and Socio-Spatial Justice, edited by Chiara Certomà and Filippo Celata. Digital Geography & Society, 3: 100043. * Winner of Best Student Paper Award at ICA. 2022.

Public Scholarship

• Au, Y. (2023) “Erasure by any other name: A response to Winnie Soon’s Unerasable Characters I-III”. Data Relations exhibit. Australian Centre of Contemporary Arts (ACCA).
• Katta, S., Au, Y., and Neerukonda, M. (2022) Hazy data days: Delivery dispatches from Hyderabad. In R. Singh, R. L. Guzmán, and P. Davison (eds.) Parables of AI in/from the majority world. pp. 137–155. Data & Society Research Institute.
• Au, Y. (2021) “Thinking Critically About Maps”. Tactical Tech, Exposing the Invisible.
• Au, Y. (2021) “An Electric Brain”. A New AI Lexicon edited by Noopur Raval and Amba Kak. AI Now. New York.
• Au, Y. (2021) “Exporting AI”. A New AI Lexicon edited by Noopur Raval and Amba Kak. AI Now. New York.
• Surveillance in the Third Millennium (2021) Special Issue on Surveillance Stories edited by Bryce Newell & Susan Cahill. Surveillance & Society. pp. 425-440.