Workshop: Studying Digital Vulnerabilities through Data Donation with A/Prof Joanna Strycharz

Target audience: ADM+S students and ECRs.
Other ADM+S members welcome.

Date: Tuesday 18 November 2025.
Time: 10am - 1pm AEDT.
This workshop will be delivered hybrid,
In person location: ADM+S Offices, RMIT University Building 97.
Address: 106 - 108 Victoria Street Carlton, VIC.
A light lunch will be provided for those attending in person.

Workshop: Studying Digital Vulnerabilities through Data Donation

This interactive workshop explores how scholars can study digital vulnerabilities in the context of advertising and branded communication. We will begin by discussing how computational advertising challenges traditional notions of consumer vulnerability and shifts attention toward data-driven and digital vulnerability. Participants will engage with a hands-on data donation tool, recently developed to collect real-world platform data on advertising exposure, targeting, and profiling practices. Together, we will experiment with donated datasets and brainstorm how such data can be linked to key advertising and communication theories (e.g., persuasion knowledge, privacy calculus, or vulnerability frameworks). The workshop combines conceptual discussion with practical exploration, offering participants concrete ideas for integrating data-driven approaches into research on digital persuasion and consumer vulnerability.

Bio

Joanna Strycharz is an Assistant Professor of Persuasive Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on advertising in the age of algorithms and artificial intelligence, with a particular emphasis on consumer vulnerability, empowerment, and individual and societal consequences of algorithmic persuasion. She is the recipient of a prestigious Dutch Research Council Veni grant for her project on vulnerability exploitation through algorithmic persuasion and co-directs the Digital Communication Methods Lab, where she fosters interdisciplinary collaborations to advance computational advertising research. Her research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Advertising, International Journal of Advertising, Journal of Business Research and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. She serves on the Editorial Review Boards of four different advertising journals, is an associate editor for Journal of Advertising, and was an associate editor for Journal of Interactive Advertising. She is the recipient of the 2024 Mary Alice Shaver Promising Professor Award and the 2021 AEJMC Emerging Scholar Grant. Beyond academia, she actively contributes to debates on ethical and responsible advertising and works with policymakers, and consumer organizations to translate research into societal and policy impact.

Questions can be directed to Manager, Research Training and Development Sally Storey (sally.storey@rmit.edu.au)