About

Burcu Baykurt is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Smart as a City: The Politics of Test-Bed Urbanism, forthcoming from University of California Press in 2026. Her writing and research focus on technologies of statecraft, including smart cities, tech nationalism, and the use of automated decision systems in public agencies. In her book, she explores the case of Kansas City, Missouri, where Google piloted a citywide gigabit network and city officials launched several smart city projects in the 2010s. Through various cases such as public-housing residents' quiet refusal of "free" gigabit internet, the city's use of predictive analytics, and public–private strategies for managing failure, Baykurt reframes test-bed urbanism as a mode of local governance that operates through civic aspiration, deliberate ignorance, and municipal politics. She argues that urban disparities are not unintended consequences of the smart city but rather the foundation upon which it is built. Her current research investigates government technology companies and public officials to understand their perspectives on government data infrastructures as they become layered with proprietary software and government datasets circulate in data markets. Baykurt has published in journals such as Information, Communication & Society, Big Data & Society, New Media & Society, and Urban Studies. She co-edited Soft-Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st Century Global Order (Columbia University Press, 2021) with Victoria de Grazia. At UMass Amherst, she convenes the Ethnography Collective and co-founded the Global Technology for Social Justice (GloTech) Lab. Additionally, she co-hosts the podcast It All Happened Before, which examines how autocracy becomes normalized around the world, drawing on examples from Turkey and other democracies.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Public relations
• Economics
• Public administration
• Business
• Political economy
• Marketing
• History
• Economic system
• Economy

Selected publications

• Smart as a City

  2026-03-31

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Smart as a City  provides a rich ethnographic investigation into how smartness is received and negotiated in a midsize US city. Burcu Baykurt follows the work of civic entrepreneurs, local residents, and city officials in Kansas City, Missouri, where Google tested a citywide gigabit service and the local government launched a series of smart city pilot projects in transportation, public housing, and municipal services. Baykurt redefines smartness as a collective effort to spotlight a city’s enduring local problems and align solutions with the often buggy, partially developed systems offered by tech companies. She shows that success in matching civic concerns with flawed tech systems is hard-won and ambiguous, and that the techniques of data capitalism extract value from urban inequalities rather than solve them.

  PublisherDOI

• Smart as a City

  2026-05-05

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  2026-03-31

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• MAINSTREAMING DECOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION

  AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research · 2026-01-02

  articleOpen access

  Over the past two decades, there have been many calls and efforts to decolonize and de-westernize research in media and communication (Aouragh & Chakravartty 2016; Couldry & Mejias 2019; Ricaurte 2019). While these efforts have generated valuable academic centers, community-driven projects, and South-to-South networks (e.g., CARGC, FemLab, Tierra Comun), the field is still dominated by (implicit) universalist perspectives. Often the Anglo-American world is taken as the primary or only frame of reference in research on topics ranging from disinformation and platform governance to AI and new creator economies. Consequently, there is continuous friction between the main conceptual frameworks in the field and the experiences, interests, and concerns from the Global Majority world (Arora 2024; Lehuede 2024; Poell et al. 2024). Similar observations have been made regarding digital advocacy work, in which top-down, techno-legal solutions from the Global North tend to dominate, leaving little room for Global Majority innovations and priorities (Ong et al 2024). In the light of these concerns, this panel invites critical conversation about diverse initiatives of mainstreaming decolonial perspectives in media and communication. We are concerned that decolonization remains a specialization, rather than a force that transforms the field as a whole. Such a transformation is important for stakeholders around the globe. Universalism shuts out research and initiatives from most parts of the world in developing knowledge frames and proposing policy solutions. But, simultaneously, it prevents Global North researchers from understanding the specificity of media and communication in the US, Europe, and Australia. In other words, multiplying frames of reference and developing more bottom-up, locally-situated approaches also means critically reflecting on the particularity of Global North institutions and practices. In discussing how to mainstream, and–crucially–how not to apply decolonial perspectives in media and communication, we are confronted with a number of complex questions. First, while we advocate for more bottom-up, situated approaches, we also recognize the need to critically attend to the global dominance of major US-based tech companies (Couldry & Mejias 2019; Madianou 2024). How can we critically examine these unequal global power relations without reverting to a universalist and techno-solutionist mindsets that only reifies the centrality of US tech corporations and regulatory agencies? Second, from our perspective, it is vital that any efforts to mainstream decolonial approaches in our discipline should resist homogenization, bureaucratization, and tokenism in processes of movement-building. How do we develop more critical and granular analytics of what are better or worse methodologies of mainstreaming decolonial perspectives? What are the risks of using decoloniality as a “metaphor”? What are the differences between decolonial and anti-colonial approaches? Finally, the elephant in the room in any discussion of decoloniality is the inequality of resources and unjust practices of knowledge production in the discipline and higher education at large. To transform the field and multiply our frames of reference, we need global networks and institutions that “walk the talk” and promote just, equitable, and sustainable ways of working and collaborating. How do we share or redistribute resources in global collaborative projects? How can our discipline’s governance bodies and associations guard against tokenism and knowledge extractivism? What are examples of centers and networks in global tech studies that have successfully navigated situations of political conflict and instability, and what survival strategies can we learn from them? These are urgent questions today as global studies initiatives in the Global North are under attack from far-right conservative groups and governments, just as decolonization discourses have been hijacked by anti-democratic ethno-nationalists in the Global Majority (Chakravartty & Roy 2023). Drawing from five parallel research initiatives that aim to develop decolonial perspectives in media and communication, this panel will address these questions and involve the audience in a conversation about best practices: 1. “Local Specificity & Global Power Relations” addresses the conceptual, methodological, and political challenges that confront us when we try to multiply our frames of reference in media and communication research, while, simultaneously, attending to the global relations of power and dependency that define the contemporary digital media ecosystem. 2. “Decolonial Tech Policy: Engaging an Oxymoron?” reflects on South-to-South network-building as a method of “mainstreaming” decolonial perspectives in tech policy and digital advocacy spaces. 3. “Decaf Intersectionality, Soft Decolonialism and the Pact of Whiteness” addresses the whitewashing and the dilution of the ideas of intersectionality and of decolonisation, stressing the race and gender power dynamics in play when reflecting upon media, communications and culture, from global South perspectives. 4. “The Generative Power of Experience-in-Context” discusses insights from a grounded exploration of the lives of women engaged in informal labour, to feed back into [decolonial] theorizing about concepts like precarity, flexibility, networks, and identity. 5. “Decolonizing Fact-checking Through the Use of Nonprofessional Mediators” investigates the role of decolonized fact-checking interventions as potential tools to combat “fake news” in two politically unstable countries: Mali and Ethiopia.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Index

  2026-03-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Google, a major stakeholder in local governance?

  Urban Studies · 2025-09-24 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Despite its pervasive presence in urban life, Google has received comparatively little scholarly attention within urban studies, especially relative to other platform companies. This special issue addresses that gap by examining Google’s evolving role in local governance. We argue that Google should be understood as an urban firm —an actor whose influence emerges not from a unified strategy but from a patchwork of experiments, negotiations, and contingent engagements across diverse territories. Three core assumptions guide our inquiry: Google is not a monolith but a constellation of actors; its operations are shaped by local socio-political contexts; and its strategy is better described as experimental and adaptative rather than a fixed or unified global plan. Conceptually, we distinguish Google from other tech companies by highlighting its dual role as both platform and infrastructure, enabled by its unique capacity to collect, organize, and monetize data. Grounded in diverse empirical cases, this issue foregrounds the fragmented, negotiated, and sometimes resisted forms of Google’s urban presence—challenging the notion of a uniform digital capitalism and emphasizing the uneven, situated nature of tech power in cities.

  PublisherDOI

• Gov-tech as capture: public infrastructures under data capitalism

  Information Communication & Society · 2025-03-19 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper examines the U.S. ‘gov-tech' market, focusing on firms that partner with government agencies to redesign digital public infrastructures. Through interviews with founders and chief technology officers of gov-tech companies, it develops ‘capture’ as a framework for analyzing how these firms commodify public data, redefine state capacity, and foster dependencies through computational systems. The study identifies three mechanisms of capture: grabbing and aggregating public datasets (data capture), reconfiguring public services into computable units (value capture), and transforming public data into market assets (regulatory capture). Drawing on insights from critical data studies and political economy, the paper demonstrates how gov-tech firms redefine state capacity and public accountability while examining the broader implications of embedding private interests in public governance under data capitalism.

  PublisherDOI

• Google urbanism 2010–2020: From infrastructural control to growing bit by bit

  Urban Studies · 2025-05-27 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines Google’s political-economic influence in the emerging ‘digital growth machine’ through two urban-tech initiatives, Fiber and Sidewalk Labs. The findings highlight the company’s dual role as both a platform and an infrastructure, its capacity for collaboration with local governments and its iterative, experimental use of urban environments. It argues that Google’s urban-tech power in cities is neither fixed nor easily defined; the company purposefully remains ambiguous in order to continually test and invest in new ventures, fuelled by the speculative ethos of Silicon Valley and the demands of venture capital. Using Google as a case study, the article calls for a broader theorisation of tech power in cities, focusing not just on economic heft but also on the ways that tech companies enlist other actors in speculative projects, and adapt, pivot and repurpose their products in response to local demands.

  PublisherDOI

• PSJ volume 4 issue 2 Cover and Front matter

  Political Science Today · 2024-05-01

  articleOpen access

  brings together political scientists from all fields of inquiry to deepen our collective understanding of politics, democracy, and citizenship around the world.For more information, visit www.apsanet.org.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Corporate Capture

  Scholarworks (University of Massachusetts Amherst) · 2024-04-24

  other1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Victoria de Grazia

  2 shared

• Sérgio Rodrigo Vale

  Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

  1 shared

• Moises Marques

  American Political Science Association

  1 shared

• Alina Vladimirova

  American Political Science Association

  1 shared

• Steven A. Smith

  American Political Science Association

  1 shared

• Kelly Golnoush Niknejad

  1 shared

• Victoria Hudson

  American Political Science Association

  1 shared

• Jon Gurstelle

  American Political Science Association

  1 shared

Labs

• Computational Social Science InstitutePI

  The lab focuses on computational social science research.

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy

  Columbia University

  2019

• Master of Arts

  New York University

  2012

• Master of Arts

  Goldsmiths, University of London

  2010