Isadora Borges Monroy

Data

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Having to pay for privacy is the epitome of a captured state that leaves everything to the market, even your human dignity.

In congressional hearings Zuckerberg has maintained that FB will never have a paid version. He has argued that this would be unfair to developing regions, but new anti-trust theories make it clear they can only set the price for ads if there is no additional information. If users became consumers on a level playing field as ad-buyers, they might wonder why they have to pay X amount and not Y. Ad sellers have to take the price or leave the market. But if uses are given the choice to pay (becoming consumers, not just the product) or not, the wealthiest and thus most lucrative (in terms of prospective sales) are likelier to pay to leave. That would tank the value of the ad market. European regulation is making the choice for Zuckerberg harder to avoid very public disclosure .

Dissertation Summary

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Download repository link

MA dissertation

An Architecture of Control: Automatic Takedown Notices in Academic Digital Publishing

A decade after graduating, UChicago’s MAPSS program has still not made available the dissertation, so here’s the original version and a shorter “updated” version.

Summary

The ease of digital distribution comes with an increased surveillance and control apparatus, the growth of digital private policing as a deliberate result of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and use Google’s transparency data on “takedown notices”. I analyze the industries’ lobbying Congress, the bill’s legal language and incentives, and I quantitatively examine over a decade of copyright holders’ requests and Google’s role in enforcing intellectual property rights, particularly in academic works.

Publications, presentations, media outreach

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Peer reviewed publications

Borges Monroy, Isadora, and Edana Beauvais. 2025. “Race and Confidence in the Police in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 519–34. Online access

Borges Monroy, Isadora. 2025. “The Surveillance Complex: Deputized Law and Order in Advanced Democracies.” Information, Communication & Society, 1–23. Online access

Book chapters

Borges Monroy, Isadora, “The surveillance complex: A political economy of digital mass surveillance in democracies.” In Handbook of Critical Data Studies, edited by Ulises A. Mejias, Jasmine E. McNealy and Milagros Miceli. De Gruyter, expected Summer 2026. Online access

Teaching

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Guest lecturer

Simon Fraser University

Undergraduate IS 365 Surveillance Capitalism in Global Context, Dr. Darren Byler’s guest
Undergraduate Dplyr/Tidyverse data wrangling, May 24, 2023, Dr. Edana Beauvais’ guest
Graduate Survey Experiment Workshop, May 12, 2023

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Cyberspace and Politics (POLS 3154), April 26, 2022, Dr. Benjamin Radford’s guest

McGill University Political Science Department

Undergraduate Political Science Research Methods (POLI 210), Fall 2019, 2020 Dr. Dietlind Stolle and Summer 2021 Colin Scott
Graduate R bootcamp (Fall 2018, Summer 2018–2022) Dr. Tim Elrick
Undergraduate United States Politics I (POLI 325), Fall 2016 & 2017 Dr. Harold M. Waller, 2018 Dr. Simon Langlois-Bertrand, Winter 2021 Dr. Jan Dutkiewicz
Undergraduate Political Participation in Comparative Perspective (POLI 361), Winter 2016 Dr. Valerie-Anne Mahéo