Welcome to Du Shen's homepage!

Hi there! I'm Du Shen, an Internet researcher, and a proud queer originally made from a rural town in Henan, China. I am passionate about topics including information freedom, ICT policy, internet governance, platforms, and digital infrastructure.

Currently, I live in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where I am taking the role of a project intern at the International Telecommunication Union's Regional Office for Africa, contributing to the Policy and Regulation Initiative for Digital Africa, an ICT development project funded by the European Union. My interests lie deeply in information technology and its potential control nature in the context of China and the Global South. Nowadays, I am on-site in Africa, actively engaging and exploring the topics that I care about. You can find my CV here.

With a keen observer's eye and a preference for qualitative methodologies, I value the connections between people profoundly. My academic journey has taken me from a Bachelor of Laws and a BA in Internet Studies at the China University of Political Science and Law to a Master’s degree in Media & Communications Governance from the London School of Economics, where I graduated with both distinctions in degree and dissertation. Supervised by Dr Jean-Christophe Plantin, my dissertation explored the infrastructuralization of China's Great Firewall (GFW), examining how censorship powers have extended into every layer of the network over the past two decades, endowed with dual functions of censorship and dataveillance. I also delved into how the GFW, as an infrastructure of internet censorship, perpetuates structural stability and efficacy by not only controlling the information but creating an unequal information ecosystem.