Alissa Centivany is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Her work explores processes of sociotechnical transformation and, in particular, the co-evolution of technology, intellectual property law, social practice, and ethics. She earned her PhD in 2016 from the University of Michigan's School of Information and also holds a JD specializing in intellectual property and technology law. Prior to joining FIMS, she was the inaugural Microsoft Research Fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University
of California-Berkeley School of Law and a researcher at the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law.
Alissa Centivany currently teaches graduate courses at FIMS on "Information Ethics" [FIMS 9137] and “Managing and Working in
Information Organizations” [MLIS 9005]. She also regularly supervises graduate students' independent research; recent projects cover topics including artificial intelligence, indigenous archives, scholarly communications and open access, ed tech, revenge porn, and more.
Alissa Centivany runs the Innovative Deviance Lab which conducts research on processes of sociotechnical transformation and, in particular, the co-evolution of technology, intellectual property law, social practice, and ethics. Her primary areas of inquiry include: right to repair, ed tech, scholarly communications and open access, and participatory policymaking in online environments. She is currently PI on a SSHRC-funded study of "The Right to Repair", co-organizer of the SSHRC-funded "Big Data at the Margins" series (https://bdam.fims.uwo.ca), a collaborator on the "Open Gaza Initiative", and a collaborator on Western's "AI & Homelessness" project.
