Andra Siibak is a Professor of Media Studies and a Deputy Head of Research and Development at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia. She is currently also leading the European Commission financed consortium Baltic Engagament Centre for Combating Information Disorders (BECID) that brings together Estonian, Lithuanian, and Latvian experts from academia, media organizations and NGOs to combat information disorders and promote media literacy in the region. Previously, she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Communication. She has held visiting professorships at Vidzeme University of Applied Science (Latvia) and the University of Latvia, and acted as a guest professor at Urbino University, Italy and at the Klaipeda State University, Lithuania. Andra Siibak is a member of the Film, Media, and Visual Studies section of Academia Europaea (since 2021) and currently serves as the General Secretary of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).

Her research interests are focused around opportunities and risks surrounding the use of the internet and new technologies. She has published more than 100 peer reviewed papers in international journals and edited collections on the topics surrounding young people’s online practices, datafication of childhood, self-presentation on social media, teacher/parental/sibling mediation of young people’s technology use, mediatization of parenting, dataveillance and AI-based technology use in education, and various cyber risks and harms e.g. issues of privacy, surveillance, dataveillance, deepfakes, social engineering scams, etc. In 2021, she co-authored together with Giovanna Mascheroni “Datafied Childhoods: Data Practices and Imaginaries in Children’s Lives”, published by Peter Lang.

During her stay at HIAS, Andra will work on her book manuscript that would provide interdisciplinary insights on the topic of datafied schools and dataveillance of students. The book project is located at the intersection of the fields of media and communication, educational sociology, critical data studies, educational sciences, and surveillance studies, and will include findings of different empirical studies constructed on the topic in Estonia and beyond.

Andra Siibak’s tandem partner is Judith Simon, professor for Ethics in Information Technology at Universität Hamburg.

Andra Siibak’s HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.