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Olivia Ben­feldt

Tenure Track Assistant Professor

Subjects
Organisation GDPR Big data Digitalisation IT

Primary research areas

Data gov­ernance
Data gov­ernance is about who gets to do what with data - and why - to cre­ate value. I study data gov­ernance as a col­lect­ive ac­tion prob­lem. My work ex­am­ines how policies and rules are ne­go­ti­ated, shap­ing what data mean and how they cre­ate value.
Datafic­a­tion at scale
I ex­plore how datafic­a­tion un­folds across scales, from per­son­al life to or­gan­iz­a­tions to so­ci­et­al in­fra­struc­tures. My re­search ex­am­ines how ten­sions shift across these levels, and how gov­ernance prac­tices travel, ad­apt, or break down.
Meth­ods in Data stud­ies
I use prac­tice-based and design-ori­ented meth­ods to probe al­tern­at­ive ways of gov­ern­ing data. This al­lows me to sur­face over­looked dy­nam­ics and ex­plore spec­u­lat­ive gov­ernance ar­range­ments.

I ex­plore how data is gov­erned in prac­tice

My work examines how data is governed, shared, and put to work. My ambition is to help organizations and societies navigate the opportunities and challenges of datafication in ways that are accountable, collaborative, and sustainable. 

At the core of my research is data governance. I study how decisions are made about who gets to define, access, and control data. My research frames data governance as a collective action problem, exploring what tensions emerge around ownership and access and how they can be negotiated to create value with data. 

I work on projects that explore: 

How organizations can build trust and accountability when sharing and reusing data across boundaries. 

How new forms of data organizing, such as data collectives and data cooperatives, enable governing of data beyond the organization. 

How data practices scale from the personal to the societal level, and what this means for policy, infrastructures, and work. 

My vision is to expand our imagination of what data governance can be; not just policies, rules, and frameworks, but also about people, organizations, and societies working to govern data collectively. 

Recent research projects

Data Stud­ies Group

I co-foun­ded the Data Stud­ies Group, an in­ter­dis­cip­lin­ary group, seek­ing to ad­vance know­ledge of the op­por­tun­it­ies and com­plex chal­lenges posed by data in or­gan­iz­a­tion and man­age­ment.
https://datastudies.cbs.dk/