Magdalena Donea

Magdalena Donea is a doctoral candidate and Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellow in the Communication and Science Studies program. Her work considers critically the affective and phenomenological dimensions of being under surveillance, particularly for migrant, refugee and other already-displaced communities. Grounded in critical surveillance and critical data studies, affect theory, and scholarship on belonging, her research focuses on urban surveillance infrastructures, municipal oversight bodies that regulate surveillance technologies, and grassroots community-based organizations that resist them. Moving through and beyond questions of how displaced people are represented and become objects of knowledge in crisis and security discourses, she asks instead how surveillance regimes contribute to affective displacement, how feelings of un-belonging emerge among migrant communities as a result of being watched, and how communities under surveillance work to subvert the gaze of these regimes to reclaim their emotional privacy and a sense of emplacement and belonging.

As a 25-year veteran of the Internet, an early web theorist, programmer, writer, and designer – and a Cold War-era political refugee – Ms. Donea’s scholarly and professional concerns also extend broadly to the technoscientific propagation of police and carceral logics into ordinary life. Along with Kathryne Metcalf and Stuart Geiger, she co-organizes the Critical Data Studies Working Group at UCSD. Prior to UCSD, she helped found the Washington Prison History Project and contributed restored code and oral history interviews to its archive. She has volunteered her skills to refugee resettlement and assistance organizations, and to community-driven surveillance oversight efforts in both Seattle and San Diego. 

Ms. Donea holds an MA in Communication from UC San Diego, an MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Washington Bothell and a Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies from the University of Washington Seattle.

PhD Student, Communication and Science Studies
University of California San Diego, 2019-Present

Master of Arts, Communication
University of California San Diego, 2023

Master of Arts, Cultural Studies
University of Washington Bothell, 2018

Graduate Certificate, Textual and Digital Studies
University of Washington Seattle, 2018

Berger, D., Donea, M., Hattwig, D., & Rowland, D. (2019). A Counter-Archive of Imprisonment: The Washington Prison History Project. Public, 5(2). https://public.imaginingamerica.org/blog/article/a-counter-archive-of-imprisonment-the-washington-prison-history-project/.