Au, Dr Yung

Academic background

Yung Au is a Junior Research Fellows in Human Geography. Her research interests are in carceral and abolitionist geographies, critical mapping and cartography, science and technology studies, the survellance industrial complex, and alternative infrastructures of justice.

Yung holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford funded by the Clarendon Scholarship. Her project examined the commodification of state surveillance, understood as a form of carceral governance, through data-driven technologies using abolitionist and post-colonial frameworks. By exploring data-driven surveillance sold to governments for policing and military purposes, her thesis examined specifically the export of surveillance commodities from historical centres of power to the rest of the world.

Yung also has also led various projects mapping surveillance supply chains and exploring the curious geographies these intersect with—such as the different elemental processes that mediates these supply chains and data infrastructures in outer space. This includes a projects funded by the Open Tech Fund visualising different stages of the surveillance technology supply chain. Similarly, a project she co-leads funded by the European AI and Society Fund investigates the political economy of miliary general purpose AI systems and the myriad ways influence is accrued in these coalitions—such as the use of data infrastructures to occupy territory or the exceptionalism granted to these public-private projects that enables technologies to be tested in wartime contexts.

In her current fellowship, she will be continuing her research into data infrastructures that stretch beyond earth as well as developing different maps and visualisations using cartographic findings from her body of work.

Yung was previously an Associate Lecturer at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London and an Academic Tutor at the University of Oxford.

Teaching

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Recent Publications

DPhil Thesis: ‘Selling Machine Sentries: An Abolitionist Exploration into the Commodification of Data-Driven State Surveillance’, University of Oxford.

Au, Y. (forthcoming 2025). Computers in our Cosmos: Geographies of Care, Abolition & Worker Movements. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Au, Y. (2023). The sprint to plug in the moon. In C. Cath (Ed.), Eaten by the Internet (pp. 27–34). Meatspace Press.

Au, Y. (2022). Data centres on the Moon and other tales: A volumetric and elemental analysis of the coloniality of digital infrastructures. Territory, Politics, Governance, 1–19. *ICA Paper Award

Au, Y. (2022). Protest, pandemic, & platformisation in Hong Kong: Towards cities of alternatives. Digital Geography and Society, 3, Article 100043. *ICA Paper Award Katta, S.,

Au, Y., and Neerukonda, M. (2022). Hazy data days: Delivery dispatches from Hyderabad. In R. Singh, R. L. Guzmán, and P. Davison (Eds.), Parables of AI in/from the majority world (pp. 137–155). Data & Society Research Institute.

Au, Y. (2021). Erasure by any other name. Data Relations exhibit. Australian Centre of Contemporary Arts.

Au, Y. (2021). An electric brain. In N. Raval and A. Kak (Eds.), A new AI lexicon. AI Now Institute.

Au, Y. (2021).Exporting AI. In N. Raval and A. Kak (Eds.), A new AI lexicon. AI Now Institute.

Au, Y. (2021). Surveillance from the third millennium. Surveillance & Society, 19(4), 425–440.

Au, Y. (2021). Thinking critically about maps: Researching, resisting and re-imagining the world. Exposing the Invisible. Tactical Tech.