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Elizabeth Staksrud

Elisabeth Staksrud (PhD) is a graduate from the University of Oslo, with a doctoral degree in Media and Communications. Her key research interests lie in two interlinked fields: research on Internet censorship and the regulation of content, and children and online risk. She finds both equally interesting, but even more so when viewed together, where the welfare and safety of children is often used as an explanation for and sometimes excuse to introduce potentially intrusive regulatory regimes and practices.

During the fellowship period she will to focus on her new project investigating the relationship between Internet industry stakeholders, the European Commission, and NGOs (in the field of child protection), by extensively analyzing the online content filtering debate and policy implementation that has taken place the past decade in Europe and in the US. The intention is that this project will result in a book ready for publishing end of 2014.

Before returning to academia Staksrud worked as an Internet policy adviser and film censor at the Norwegian Board of Film Classification in 1999. In 2001 she initiated the cross-European SAFT project, supported by the European Commission, aimed at providing safety advice, facts and tools for the safe use of the Internet by the general public with a special focus on children and youths. The project conducted one of the largest international representative surveys on children and parents' use and knowledge of the Internet to date, and the data stemming from it is still being used and cited worldwide.

After SAFT she has been the coordinator of several awareness projects under the European Commission (EC) Safer Internet Action Plan, including pan-European training for awareness raisers. She has also worked as an adviser to the EC on the Eurobarometer survey, and is currently (2011 – 2014) the national project manager and head of dissemination for the 35 country EUkids Online project (www.eukidsonline), based at the London School of Economics. She is a widely used public lecturer, with several publications in books and journals, as well as a former officially appointed ICT adviser to the Norwegian minister of government administration and reform.