21 November 2019
Samantha Pay
DPhil Student
Samantha Pay
DPhil Student
Sam Jane Pay is a DPhil student at the Oxford Internet Institute, researching algorithmic governance in the life domain of online television. Her work builds on her Master’s thesis, The Algorithmic Female: stereotypes, streaming and self-regulation in everyday personalisation culture – a qualitative and data science mixed methods project – which received the OII Thesis Prize in 2019.
Drawing on her background in media, as a multidisciplinary therapist, and as a policy-maker in the ending VAWG sector, Sam’s PhD research investigates how women make meaning within the situated and algorithmically regulated environment of online TV in relation to the representational continuum. Her work contributes to the existing literature and understanding of algorithmic governance and provides a timely response to historic strategic objectives on women and media technologies in the BDPfA (1995).
Her DPhil project “Algorithmic Governance: fragments, feminism, and phenomenology in the age of online TV” develops an innovative multimodal feminist hermeneutic phenomenology grounded in the work of Patricia Benner and Max van Manen and adapted to engage with digital life and the AI age. This methodological framework carefully integrates traditional hermeneutic analysis with AI-assisted thematic analysis in a dialogic – not hierarchical – relationship, supporting hermeneutic reduction within the hermeneutic circle.
Alongside this, Sam repositions contemporary algorithmic audit practices within a hermeneutic tradition, returning to the original meaning of audit as attentive listening – a move that reorients auditing toward lived meaning rather than measurement. As part of this, she extends the Bennerian small-group interview method to digital life in reflective, small-group conversations on her Substack, inviting interpretive dialogue in a public yet intimate forum.
Sam’s approach is rooted in continuum thinking, ontological inquiry, and a commitment to honouring the richness of embodied knowledge in an increasingly disembodied technological world.
Prior to academia, Sam worked in media and ran a private therapy practice in London for 20 years, specialising in domestic and sexual violence, which led to her role in policy consultation. Her professional history and dedication to mind-body integration deeply inform her academic lens.
Sam is also a keen gardener, yin yogi, mind-body medicine practitioner, and trained silversmith. She writes regularly on Substack at Me, Myself, and AI, where she explores the human impact of emerging technologies through philosophical reflections, personal narratives, and academic inquiry. Her writing spans academic and cultural reflection, speculative thinking, and the ongoing question of how we might live well – and mindfully – alongside intelligent machines.
Algorithms; Specifically Recommender Systems; Gender bias; AI ethics, and issues of gender-based violence against women and girls in digital; IoT, and personalisation culture; VR for therapy settings.
21 November 2019
