Jason Branford

Jason Branford is a Researcher at the University of Hamburg within the Department of Informatics, affiliated with the Ethics in Information Technology (EIT) research group.

• His research focuses on the moral and social implications of technology, particularly its intersection with social and political structures, equality, bias, oppression, and justice.
• Philosophically inspired by John Dewey's pragmatism, Iris Marion Young's feminism, and relational egalitarianism, he emphasizes socially embedded approaches to ethics and technology.

Jason earned his PhD at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich), where his dissertation reoriented the human enhancement debate from physical augmentation to enhancing human lives within unjust social contexts.

• Teaching Experience: Winter 2021/22 - Ethics Workshop: Doing Ethics Assessments in Informatics (Bachelor); Summer 2021 - Ethics & IT (Bachelor); Winter 2019/20 - Foundations of Normative Ethics and Solving Moral Problems (Venice International University, Co-taught); Summer 2019 - Cosmopolitanism and the Nation (LMU Munich, Co-taught); Winter 2018/19 - Moral Progress (LMU Munich, Co-taught); Summer 2018 - John Rawls: Justice as Fairness (LMU Munich, Co-taught); Winter 2017/18 - Academic Writing in Philosophy (LMU Munich).

He supervises theses addressing the social, moral, and political dimensions of technologies like affective computing, recommender systems, and large-language models, especially from feminist, decolonial, and critical theory perspectives.