Lyuba Encheva

Lyuba Encheva is a communications scholar whose research areas include algorithmic representation of emotion, persuasive technologies, human-computer interaction, gamification and digital humanities. She focuses on the ways in which the technological restructuring of communication processes leads to the reorganization of social relations and hierarchies. As a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Life Institute, she is the Lead of the Coding Happiness project which tracks the digital uses of human emotion and evaluates the social, political and ethical ramifications of emotion recognition technologies as systems of representation and social stratification.

Encheva received her degree from the graduate program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University under the supervision of Dr. Isabel Pedersen. Her thesis entitled ‘Gamification: The Magic Circle of Technology’ examines the political agenda of gamification as a communication phenomenon and user experience design trend. Some of her research has been published in Rhetor: Journal of the Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, The International Journal of the Image, and the edited collection Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime.