dr. D (Daniel) Trottier

Biography

Daniel Trottier is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Daniel’s research addresses the social impacts of new technologies in daily life, with an emphasis on how individuals and organisations understand how personal information and private exchanges are made public. His current focus includes use of digital media for the purposes of expressing grievances, and denouncing others.

Daniel obtained his PhD in Sociology from Queen’s University, Canada in 2011. His dissertation examined how young adults, organisations and businesses made sense of Facebook’s global ascent, and the consequences this brought for each of them. He then accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta, to further advance a surveillance studies approach to digital media. He then completed postdoctoral fellowships at Uppsala University in Sweden, and the University of Westminster, UK, where he served as work package lead of two Horizon projects (PACT: Public Perception of Security and Privacy: Assessing Knowledge, Collecting Evidence, Translating Research into Action; RESPECT: Rules, Expectations & Security through Privacy-Enhanced Convenient Technologies), to examine police institutions’ perceptions and adoption of social media surveillance.

Upon joining Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2014, Daniel obtained a VIDI to advance the study of Digital Vigilantism for five years. He has subsequently obtained funding to study the impacts of digitalisation on social life including in domains of urban security (IcARUS: Innovative AppRoach to Urban Security), neighbourhood reputation (SYMTRA: Digital Technologies in Symbolic Trajectories of Urban Neighbourhoods) and the ethics of AI development in public safety (AI-MAPS: AI for Multi-Agency Public Safety issues).

Daniel has published extensively, including seven books (three of which are open access) and sixty articles, book chapters and encyclopaedia entries. His 2012 book Social Media as Surveillance: Rethinking Visibility in a Converging World received ten favourable reviews, and was awarded the 2013 Surveillance Studies Network book prize. He has delivered over sixty keynotes and invited lectures at international conferences, symposiums, and doctoral summer schools.

In addition to supervising eight PhD researchers, Daniel has also served as an examiner for 17 PhD dissertations across disciplines including criminology, information studies, population health, psychology, political science, and management.

Daniel teaches in the International BSc Communication and Media (IBCoM), the MA Media Studies, where he also serves as thesis co-coordinator, and the Research master Sociology of Culture, Media and the Arts. Since 2022 he chairs the Research Ethics Review Committee at ESHCC. He is also participating in the SSH-Breed sector plan as co-lead of Theme 6 "Data and cyber harms at work."