Kira Allmann

Kira is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Media Law & Policy at the University of Oxford, where her research focuses on issues of digital inequality and the environmental impact of internet infrastructure. She is an anthropologist, currently works with people who are closing the digital divide from the bottom up, in their communities. She leads a project on community networks (internet networks owned and operated by local communities) and is the principal investigator of the Oxfordshire Digital Inclusion Project, examining the role of public libraries in closing the digital divide in the UK.

Kira is also the Communications Director at the Oxford Human Rights Hub and a research partner of the Whose Knowledge? campaign, which works to center the knowledge of marginalized communities on the web and raise awareness of the digital exclusions that keep the majority of the world from participating fully in digital knowledge creation and curation.

She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where her dissertation focused on how mobility between online and offline spaces constituted a practice of resistance during and after the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Between 2011 and 2015, Kira conducted ethnographic research in Egypt, blending online and offline qualitative methods, to investigate how the use of digital technologies by Egyptian youth were transforming virtual and physical spaces in the city of Cairo.