Lauren Bridges

Lauren Bridges is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Her work critically examines the material, environmental, and societal implications of digital infrastructures, surveillance systems, and technological governance. She can be reached at lbridges@virginia.edu.

• Research Focus: Digital environmental justice, surveillance capitalism, and critical data studies.
• Key Themes: Data center impacts, e-waste geographies, AI critique, and community surveillance dynamics.

Publication Trends: Recent work analyzes the paradoxes of digital sovereignty (2020-2024), environmental costs of cloud computing (2023-2025), and resistance to techno-surveillance regimes (2020-2021).