Western Norway Research Institute

Hilde G. Corneliussen has been a lecturer in Humanistic Informatics and Digital Culture at University of Bergen (1998 – 2016) and at WNRI since 2013. At UoB she developed her expertise on topics such as gender and technology and gender equality in STEM. She has taught, supervised and developed education on BA, MA and PhD levels in Humanistic Informatics and Digital Culture. At WNRI she has been involved in projects on eHealth and IT education. Her main research interest is related to mechanisms of exclusion and strategies for inclusion of women and minorities in STEM in general and technology in particular. Corneliussen will be project leader for the NORDWIT pillar focusing on women's technology-driven careers in rural research and innovation.

Gilda Seddighi has a PhD from Department for Information Science and Media Studies and affiliated with the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research from University of Bergen. She works as a researcher at WNRI. Seddighi will be a Norwegian project partner for the NORDWIT pillar on women’s technology-driven careers in rural regions and will contribute to the pillar on research intensive science and innovation regions. Her research interests are in transnationalism, feminism, inclusion and social justice in the context of implementation and use of information and communication technology.

Bridgette Wessels is Professor of Social Inequalities in the Digital Age, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow and a Guest Researcher at WNRI. Her research area focuses broadly on social change in the digital age and the innovation and use of digital technology and services. Her research focuses on a range of areas with projects on social exclusion and digital divides, financial exclusion and the e-economy, social media and political inequality, health and telehealth, welfare services and (digital) identity, regional/digital journalism and participatory democracy, and e-policing, ethnicity and communities, and gender and technology. Her work has addressed inequality and e-inclusion at a global level in South East Asia, Australia, USA, and Europe. Recent research has focused on open data, addresses emerging inequalities embedded within access to data and the inequalities of knowledge required to use data and the use of social media in contexts of political inequality and civic inequality in political culture.

Carol Azungi Dralega (PhD) is an Associate Professor at NLA University College, Norway. She is an associate partner on the NORDWIT Norwegian team focusing on Pillar 1: Women’s technology-driven careers in rural research and innovation and in Pillar 4: Digital Humanities. Her overall research interests revolve around two cross-cutting areas: ICT and empowerment in relation to issues surrounding marginalization and e-Inclusion and Media, gender and social justice. She is interested in the ever evolving linkages and tensions within and between related theory, policy, process and practice with emphasis on participatory and inclusive approaches as important strategies for bridging disjuncture.

Kari Dyb, PhD in sociolgy, is a researcher at the Norwegian Centre for E-Health Research. Dyb does research in the field of e-health and has been working within e-health since 2004 and is particularly interested in how the introduction of new technology affects or disrupts established clinical practice. She has researched the introduction and use of e-health, but is also interested in why new healthcare technologies fail to be adopted, or why they are used differently to what was expected. Dyb har extensive experience from a number of different research projects.

Radhika Gajjala (PhD, University of Pittsburgh, 1998) is a Professor of Media and Communication and of American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University, USA. She has researched non-profit organizations and also engaged in community partnerships with biracial communities in the U.S. She has been director of Women’s Studies and of American Culture studies programs at BGSU. Her work that engages themes related to globalization, digital labor, feminism and social justice. Published books include "Cyberculture and the Subaltern" (Lexington Press, 2012) and "Cyberselves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women" (Altamira, 2004). Gajjala is collaborating with the team at Western Norway Research Institute, on topics of women in technology and e-health.