Blog Posts
I irregularly write blogs or post about my work and other matters, which you can can find here
Publications
If you’re interested in reading more about my work then you can find my academic and other writings here
About Me
My name’s Kean Birch. I’m Director of the Institute for Technoscience & Society and Professor in the Department of Science, Technology & Society and the Graduate Program in Science & Technology Studies at York University, Canada. From July 2024, I took up the Ontario Research Chair in Science Policy.
I’m really interested in how ‘things’ – ranging from personality through knowledge to personal data – are turned into assets; that is, into techno-economic objects whose value is often derived from the capitalization of future revenue streams. A key dimensions to this assetization process is the search for ‘durable economic rents’, so I’m also interested in diverse forms of rentiership, understood as a social process and practice.
Currently, I’m mainly focusing on personal data, Big Tech, and other digital technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, Blockchain, etc.), but I’ve done research in the past on biotechnology, biofuels, infrastructure, and low-carbon technologies.
Latest posts
- Launch of New Institute!I’m Director of a new research centre at York University called the Institute for Technoscience & Society. Check out the recently launched website! “Our aim is to build a global hub of critical and interdisciplinary research and knowledge mobilization on the relationship between technoscience and society, especially the configuration of social power underpinning scientific claims, medical practices, emerging technologies, and sites of innovation. York has one of the largest concentrations of and internationally renowned experts working on these important societal issues and the ITS aims to support these researchers as they promote socially responsible and inclusive technoscience”. Institute for Technoscience… Read More »Launch of New Institute!
- New special issue: New Frontiers of Techno-economic RentiershipNew Frontiers of Techno-Economic Rentiership in Competition & Change “In this guest introduction, we explore emerging critiques at the frontiers of techno-economic rentiership. Rentiership is a process entailing political-economic and technological (i.e. techno-economic) relations, formations, practices, and justifications underpinning the ownership and/or control of assets, which enable the capture of future revenue streams (i.e. what we call rents). Conceptually, in this context, rentiership permits us to analyse the increasingly diverse techno-economic dimensions of those future revenue streams, rather than being a normative term for identifying ‘good’ or ‘bad’ forms of revenue (i.e. profit vs. rent)….” ‘Introduction’ by Kean Birch, Callum… Read More »New special issue: New Frontiers of Techno-economic Rentiership
- Recent Opeds on Big Tech & Competition Policy
I’ve had a couple of opinion pieces come out over the last couple of months in Canada’s National Post newspaper dealing with competition and Big Tech. They can be accessed here: Opinion: We need to get beyond the status quo in regulating Big Tech in Canada (10 January 2022) Opinion: Big Tech poses challenges our outdated competition laws were not designed to address (29 November 2021) There’s an interesting public debate going on right now in Canada around whether the government needs to introduce new competition laws/policies to deal with Big Tech. On one side are commentators who think the… Read More »Recent Opeds on Big Tech & Competition Policy