Jonathan Corpus Ong (PhD, Cambridge) is Professor of Global Digital Media at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst.
I am a public intellectual engaged in international policy debates related to disinformation, mediated public participation, and digital humanitarianism, with a consistent record of advocacy work with diverse sectors of human rights, diasporic community media, and tech workers. I am the inaugural director of the Global Technology for Social Justice Lab, a creative hub that advances a community-driven model for tech studies and tech justice advocacy that centers the Global Majority.
My research and advocacy work is centrally concerned with the moral and political consequences of media and digital technologies, particularly technological interventions in the context of development, humanitarianism, and media and democracy in the Global Majority. I have published 3 books, over 40 articles, and over a dozen public policy reports examining the uneven impacts of media interventions “for good” and technologies “advancing democracy”. Inspired by traditions of media ethics and media anthropology, I use ethnographic and participatory research methods to center the voices of ordinary citizens and precarious workers when developing normative analysis of “good” and “bad” interventions and everyday practices.
My research in disinformation studies takes a critical and ethnographic approach in exploring the social identities, work arrangements and moral justifications of “paid trolls” and political public relations strategists in Southeast Asia. My academic research applies a unique transnational lens into the political economy of disinformation. I am passionate about knowledge translation, having co-hosted a “disinformation whistleblowers” podcast Catch Me If You Can and launching a Community Engagement Fund that supports academic-civil society partnerships for digital literacy interventions in the Philippines.
My research projects and space-building initiatives have been funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Luminate Group, the Gates Foundation, the USA’s National Science Foundation, the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, The Asia Foundation, and others.
Research interest: Media ethics, critical disinformation studies, global media studies, anthropology of humanitarianism and human rights, sociology of activist organizations, inter-ethnic racism and solidarities, politics in the global South.
