Ksenia Lavrenteva

Ksenia is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter Law School, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. Her doctoral research develops the concept of Embodied Data Rights to address the governance of touch and movement data produced in the digitisation of craft practices. She examines how these datasets are captured, processed, and standardised, and how they challenge existing legal frameworks on ownership, consent, and reuse.

Her research highlights the gaps in EU and UK law around tactile and kinematic data, which fall uneasily between intellectual property, data protection, and cultural heritage regulation. She also investigates how international technical standards shape what kinds of embodied knowledge are preserved or lost, and how governance models could embed principles of attribution, benefit-sharing, and responsible reuse into digitisation projects.

Before transitioning to academia, Ksenia worked for more than a decade as a lawyer, contributing to advocacy, policy, and NGO work. These practical experiences continue to inform her academic interests and reinforce her commitment to developing frameworks that support equitable and sustainable uses of technology and data.

Ksenia holds a First Class LLB (2012), an MA with Distinction (2022), and an MRes in Socio-Legal Research with Distinction (2024).