Dr Sveta Milyaeva

My research interests are in the field of economic sociology where I have been studying digital personal data and financial derivatives markets. I focus on the economic mode of digital society – where digital technologies come from, how they enable trade, exchange and resource allocation, and how they are governed. I completed a PhD in sociology, in particular in social studies of finance, where I focused on how financial products are shaped by digital and legal technologies of global trading.

Since 2013 I have been working on an ERC-funded project examining the issues related to digital personal data and its commercial use. I conducted research in the online personal data industry and start-ups in Europe and the US to expand on how privacy (or control of digital data) innovative products emerge in digital markets. I am also inetersted in the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and how specific legal techniques reconcile economic and civic concerns in public governance of the global online data market. 

Although my core research interests are in the economic dimension of the digital, as an economic sociologist I am also interested in how the economy formats the society, specifically the marketisation of UK higher education. Here I look into the financialisation of higher education through accounting for student loans and the REF 2014 as a market device.