Dr. Joanna Hesketh

Driven by a profound passion for understanding media's influence, Joanna Hesketh's expertise lies at the intersection of technology, human behavior, and societal impact. Her core teaching focuses on digital behavior, data ethics, and digital literacy. She's particularly interested in the regulatory environment, identifying crucial gaps that can be detrimental to our social and cultural evolution. As data aggregation increasingly shapes our digital and physical lives, Joanna champions a deeper understanding of the trade-offs between convenience and identity in our adoption of new technologies, including the rapid rise of and ethical concerns surrounding emerging AI, like LLMs. As an active faculty member in VIU's Community-Based Applied Interdisciplinary Research (CBAIR), she co-leads student teams with colleagues from the social sciences to address real-world problems for local organizations. 

Student Research Supervised

CBAIR Project Community Partners: Nanaimo Chamber of Commerce (2020), Loaves and Fishes (2021), Risebridge (2024), VIU’s Thriving in Action (2023) and The Nanaimo Hospital Foundation (2022).

Joanna usually teaches:

MARK 237 - Privacy, Surveillance and Analytics in a Digital Age
MBAA 500 - Foundations 1
MBAA 537 - Technology 3: Digital Behaviour 
CBAIR: Community Based Applied Interdisciplinary Research

Professional Work

Joanna provides consulting and training to the community, companies and organizations navigating safety, ethics and data management for an increasingly AI dependent world. This work includes things like AI policy development for a small business and digital/AI literacy workshops for community groups. 

Fun Fact

 Joanna is a VIU Alum! She came straight to VIU, then Malaspina, from Wellington High School here in Nanaimo and did her first two degrees with us. It was during her MBA at VIU that she found out about this thing called ‘media psychology’ and it quickly became her passion.