PhD Defence Anne Oloo 7 September 2026
On 7th September, Anne Oloo defended her dissertation titled, “Algorithmic Accountability and Human Rights: Towards an Inclusive Framework for Social Media Obligations”. Her dissertation brings together scholarship on algorithmic accountability, human rights law, and the obligations of multinational corporations, while challenging the predominantly Global North focus of existing debates. Drawing on African human rights frameworks and using Kenya as a case illustration, Anne develops a framework for algorithmic human rights accountability that responds to structural power imbalances, state repression, corporate responsibility, and the distinctive role social media platforms play in contemporary public life.We are very proud to celebrate this milestone with you.
Dr. Oloo was supervised by Professor dr Wouter Vandenhole. Her PhD Commission members were Prof Dr Gamze ERDEM TÜRKELLİ and Prof Dr Catherine Van de Heyning. The jury also included Prof dr Eva Lievens Prof. dr George Ogola and Dr Peggy Valcke.
Dr. Oloo will soon be starting work on her FWO Post-Doctoral Project VIRAL.
Research Tea with Dr. Bram Smet 8 September 2026
Dr Bram J D. of Tampere University joined us to introduce “slow erasure,” a framework developed through long-term ethnographic research and relationships in Palestine. His research examines how settler-colonial violence can operate through accumulated practices including restrictions on movement, fragmentation of land, imprisonment, injury, and the suppression of knowledge and identity. An essential caution accompanied the language of slowness: violence is not “slow” to those living through it. What appears incremental or less visible from a distance may be experienced as continuous precarity, alongside abrupt and devastating assaults. Pace and visibility depend on positionality and the politics of witnessing. Slow erasure therefore draws attention not only to the accumulation of harm, but also to the processes through which that harm is rationalised, normalised and denied. It asks us to examine how the boundaries of what appears acceptable can shift over time and what role law may play in either challenging or reinforcing that process.The session left us reflecting on a pressing question for law and development research: how can law respond to structural violence when its own categories prevent it from seeing the full pattern?
The session was organised by Maha Abdallah. Learn more about Dr De Smet’s work here.