Ella Streefkerk

Ella Streefkerk (she/her) is a doctoral researcher in Empirical Computational Ethics at the Centre for Critical Computational Studies (C3S). Her doctoral research is primarily located in the ELLIOT project, where she contributes to WP2 on the social and ethical dimensions of European multimodal AI foundation models. Drawing on feminist, queer, and post- and de-colonial perspectives, she studies how NSFW (not-safe-for-work) taxonomies move across ML pipelines, from platforms, to datasets and into model development and application.

Education

MA in Cultural Data and AI (Media Studies), University of Amsterdam

  • Thesis: "The Porn to Computer Vision Pipeline: Tracing the Implications of Identity Construction on NSFW Platforms for Computer Vision Technologies" (cum laude)
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  • Research Internship at the HAVA-Lab (University of Amsterdam) focusing on empirical ethics in video AI development

BA in Media and Culture (Media Studies), University of Amsterdam

  • Completion of Minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies
Research

Research Interests

  • Categorisation systems and encoding of demographic identities

  • Empirical ethics in data practices and AI development

  • Vulnerabilisation in data processes

Methods

  • Computational methods

  • Qualitative analysis

  • Ethnographic and reflexive approaches

Publications

Journal Publications

Potapova, Vera, Ella Streefkerk, Ariel Brancaforte, and Dasha Simons. 2026. "Bias in Reflection: An Ethnographic Investigation of the Developer-Dataset Relationship." (In Review)

Martinez Pandiani, Delfina S., Paula M. Helm, and Ella Streefkerk. 2026. "Platformed Childhood: Observing, Mapping, and Enacting Child Vulnerability in Family Vlogs." (In Submission)

Conference Contributions

Martinez Pandiani, Delfina S., Ella Streefkerk, Laurens Naudts, and Paula Helm. 2026. "From Vulnerable Data Subjects to Vulnerabilizing Data Practices." Forthcoming in Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.

Preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.15990.

Streefkerk, Ella, and Paula Helm. 2026. "The Price of Gaining Access: NSFW Pipeline Analysis." Forthcoming in Proceedings of the 2026 EASST Conference.

Contact

Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S)

Eschersheimer Landstraße 121

60322 Frankfurt am Main

Email: streefkerk@c3s.uni-frankfurt.de