Fran Meissner

Fran Meissner is an Assistant Professor of Critical Geodata Studies and Geodata Ethics at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist and her work explores how the global economy of geodata manifests itself in cities. She aims to better understand and theorize urban socialities in times of information infrastructures that intimately link ordinary urban spaces with orbital technologies. For this she, amongst other things, studies the use of earth observation and other geo-information technologies in cities e.g. for digital-planning and urban surveillance. Before starting at Twente Fran was an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Leiden. She has previously held a highly competitive Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship at the TU Delft. Fran remains a long term research partner at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, where she completed her PhD work as a Doctoral Research Fellow.

Fran has previously been a Junior Research Group Leader at the University of Kassel and a Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the Migration and Diaspora Studies Center. She started her post-doctoral career as a Max Weber Fellow at the prestigious European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

Previously her works has and in part continues to grapple with novel perspectives on migrant socialities in cities and the diversity dynamics this produces. Through her PhD research she has developed a keen interest in the use of innovative visualisations to facilitate the analysis of complex data - something she now critically questions and studies. Her PhD research is an empirical application of superdiversity. It investigates how multidimensional forms of migration related differentiations can be studied through the social networks of migrants from numerically small migrant groups. The work on ‘Socialising with Diversity’ is in the interdisciplinary field of Migration Studies and it has been awarded by the University of Sussex and was published with Palgrave. Her previous work also engaged with better understanding the complex configurations of the legal statuses migrants inhabit in different cities and neighbourhoods.

Her most recent obsession, next to climbing, is to explore and better conceptualize how technology and big data will change future urban diversities.