Events

Via Zoom - RSVP Here  The Quello Center 2024-2025 speaking series is co-hosted by the Information Policy Workshop and presents works-in-progress on topics covered by the Information Policy Book Series of The MIT Press. The series is co-organized by Sandra Braman and Keith Hampton. Proposals for presentations (and for books!) are welcome; please contact Sandra at bramansa@msu.edu if you are interested. All talks will be recorded and will be available to those who have registered. For a copy of the recording, please reach out to Ashley Wilson at wils1620@msu.edu In the wake of the end of the USSR, the Russian Internet initially developed […]

Via Zoom – RSVP Here  The Quello Center 2024-2025 speaking series is co-hosted by the Information Policy Workshop and presents works-in-progress on topics covered by the Information Policy Book Series of The MIT Press. The series is co-organized by Sandra Braman and Keith Hampton. Proposals for presentations (and for books!) are welcome; please contact Sandra at bramansa@msu.edu if you are interested. All talks will be recorded and will be available to those who have registered. For a copy of the recording, please reach out to Ashley Wilson at wils1620@msu.edu On a planet of waste, where whole populations and regions are written off as externalities, the notion […]

Via Zoom  RSVP Here | or email quello@msu.edu A Rural Computing Research Consortium/Quello Center joint event. Between June and September of 2024, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) accepted public comments on whether a statutory law should be established to allow an experimental use exception for products protected by utility patents. This problem has emerged because of conflicting court decisions over whether scientific research on patented products constitutes patent infringement. Agricultural crops were immune to these concerns until the 1980s, when utility patents began to be applied to living organisms. Prior to this, crops were protected by the Plant Variety Protection Act […]

Via Zoom  RSVP Here | or email quello@msu.edu An Internet Governance Project (IGP)/Quello Center joint event. On April 4, 2025, the Internet Governance Project (IGP) in collaboration with the Quello Center will gather scholars of differing views to debate what digital sovereignty means, how it is being used as a label, and whether the various interpretations of the term are compatible with the foundational values of the open internet. Recently, new books and analyses have been published, including the book edited by Min Jiang and Luca Belli, Digital sovereignty in the BRICS countries (Cambridge, 2025), the volume by Johannes Thumfart, The liberal internet […]

Via Zoom  To RSVP please email quello@msu.edu More information to come.   Robert Gorwa did graduate work in media and communication/internet studies (MSc) and politics and international relations (DPhil) in Oxford before joining the WZB as one of its Digitization Postdocs. He conducts interdisciplinary empirical and conceptual research on various dimensions of technology policy, with a special interest in emerging socio-technical governance infrastructures and institutions in the platform economy. Since moving to Berlin, he has been organizing the WZB's Platform Politics and Policy Seminar series, coordinating the Platform Governance Research Network (PlatGovNet), and completing the research for his first book (published in 2024 […]