In 2021, Loup Cellard finished his PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of Warwick, UK). From June 2021 till August 2023, he was a postdoctoral research fellow working on the ecological implications of the digital. His work took part in the Melbourne Law School node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (based at RMIT, Melbourne). His research is situated in science & technology studies (STS) and materialist approaches to media studies, and focused on subsea telecom cables, AI environmental impacts as well as public sector algorithmic decision-making. Starting in September 2023, he is now researcher at the French coop Datactivist where he is helping organisations explaining and documenting their algorithms. His work as been featured in major French media such as Radio France, l’ADN, Acteurs Publics, Reporterre and Socialter.
His PhD thesis entitled Theatres of Algorithmic Transparency: a post-digital ethnography is an empirical fieldwork conducted in 2018 at Etalab, the French Open Data task force. As a researcher embedded in Etalab, Loup helped to organise design-based engagement events to elucidate social aspects of algorithmic transparency. This unique approach enabled him to formulate practice-based recommendations for the evaluation of public policies in the area of « algorithmic transparency, » taking into account both institutional constraints and democratic affordances of the politics of openness. His commitment to shaping the field of policy innovation is evident in his authorship of a white-paper commissioned by the French Open Data task force, which was recently cited in the Automating Society Report 2020 by the advocacy organisation Algorithm Watch.
Loup has written on the politics of transparency devices for the critical theory journal Multitudes, and his methodological paper proposing a “post-digital ethnography of algorithms” has been published in a special issue of New Media & Society. Prior to his PhD thesis, he worked as a data visualisation designer at the Medialab of Sciences-Po in Paris and the Digital Humanities Lab at EPFL, Lausanne. From 2011 to 2014 he was an editor of the French design criticism review Strabic, his involvement in the field of design continues through his role as an educator supervising students at the industrial design school ENSCI-Les Ateliers.