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 I'm Du Shen, an Internet researcher, and a proud queer originally made from a rural town in Henan, China.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, and digital infrastructure.
Currently, I live in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where I am taking the role of a full-time 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 LLB in Legal Studies and a BA in Internet Studies at the China University of Political Science and Law to a MSc degree in Media & Communication Governance from the London School of Economics, where I graduated with both distinctions in degree and dissertation. Supervised by Dr Jean-Christophe Plantin, my master's thesis explored the infrastructuralization of China's Great Firewall (GFW), examining how censorship/surveillance power has extended into every layer of the network in China over the past two decades, endowed with dual functions of censorship and dataveillance. I also analyzed 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.