Conference TILTing Perspectives 2021: Regulating in Times of Crisis

Barbara Prainsack is a professor and Head of Department at the Department of Political Science at the University Vienna, where she also directs the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity (CeSCoS), and the interdisciplinary Research Platform “Governance of Digital Practices”. Her work explores the social, ethical, and regulatory dimensions of genetic and data-driven practices and technologies in biomedicine and forensics. Barbara is currently a member of the National Bioethics Commission in Austria, and a member of the European Group on Ethics of Science and New Technologies advising the European Commission. Her latest books are: Personalized Medicine: Empowered Patients in the 21st Century? (New York University Press, 2017), and Solidarity in Biomedicine and Beyond (with A. Buyx, Cambridge University Press, 2016). A new book will be published in August: The Pandemic Within: Policy Making for a Better World (with H. Wagenaar, Policy Press).

Kate Harvey is a Senior Research Officer at the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, where she produces policy reports and engages stakeholders on a wide range of bioethical issues. Most recently, Kate worked on the Council’s project on research in global health emergencies.

From November 2020 until April 2021, Kate was seconded to the Liminal Spaces Project at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Law – a five-year project that provided an integrated, interdisciplinary, cross-cutting analysis of health research regulation. At Edinburgh, Kate worked with Professor Graeme Laurie to produce a series of policy briefs and concept notes to capture the project’s key themes and conclusions.

One of the policy briefs focused on how health research regulatory systems can strengthen their trustworthiness. Kate has explored this issue further through considering how proxies of trust in health regulation have fared during the COVID-19 pandemic, what regulatory ecosystems might do to engender trust in this rapidly-changing situation, and how we can assess and test whether old proxies of trust – such as consent, anonymisation, and transparency – remain fit for purpose. To navigate these issues, Kate developed an ethical framework and a paper which presents this framework is currently under review. A podcast where Kate discusses trustworthiness across health research and its systems with Professor Laurie will shortly be available on the Liminal Spaces’ website.

Sofia Ranchordas is a  Full Professor of European and Comparative Public Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Sofia Ranchordas conducts research on public law and digital technology from an interdisciplinary perspective. She has more than ten years of experience in the field of regulation and governance, including e-commerce and digital platforms (sharing economy, P2P, online reputational mechanisms). Her research interests include the study of data-driven regulation, the impact of Big Tech on fundamental rights and good administration as well as new approaches to better regulation, experimental legislation, and innovation policy. She has published a number of articles and books on these topics and is a regular speaker at international conferences. She held previous academic positions at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, Tilburg University and Leiden University. Sofia Ranchordas has been the recipient of both national and international grants and awards (e.g., Niels Stensen Fellowship, Knight Foundation, NWO Smart Governance, KNAW). She is the General Editor of the Review of European Administrative Law and co-founder of the European Law & Tech Network. She has advised the Dutch government and the European Commissionon several matters regarding the regulation of new technological developments. In 2021, she was invited to give keynote presentations at the ICON-S and ECPR (Regulation and Governance) annual and bi-annual conferences.

Tamar Sharon is an associate professor in philosophy of technology and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Hub for Security, Privacy and Data Governance (iHub) at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Tamar received her PhD from Bar Ilan University in Israel in 2011. Her research explores the impacts of new and emerging technologies on society from an empirical-philosophical perspective, and seeks to develop normative responses to the challenges posed by digitalization to public values and the common good. She has published on human enhancement, self-tracking for health, the Quantified Self, privacy, and the political economy of personal health data sharing and use. She is currently PI of an ERC-funded project on the “Googlization of health”, or the increasing role played by Big Tech in medical research and health provision. 

Moderator: Ronald Leenes

Competition and Market Regulation track :  

Anu Bradford , Colombia Law School - The Future of Liberal Democracy in the Era of Surveillance Capitalism and Digital Authoritarianism

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Intellectual property (IP) Law:

Mark Lemley, Stanford Law School - The Contradictions of Platform Regulation

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We welcome research papers, position papers, work-in-progress presentations and other academic contributions fitting the topic of the conference.  We value multi- and inter-disciplinary approach highly, yet are also open to specialized papers on a relevant topic from a particular scientific discipline.

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