In 2018, I became Data & Society’s first Director of Research. I took on this position after I was tenured at the University of Washington in the Department of Anthropology. At that point in my career, I had been working without pause in academic settings for almost two decades, first at the University of Chicago, where I completed my graduate studies, and then in my first position as a faculty member at the University of Washington, which I began six months after defending my dissertation. I needed a break. 

At Data & Society, I met an unparalleled group of thinkers dedicated to understanding and then explaining what was happening all around us in tech in a time that was then called the era of Big Data. While at Data & Society, I founded the Trustworthy Infrastructures program to study, from the ground up and from the perspective of communities, the sociotechnical aspects that undergird trust. Under the amazing leadership of Maia Woluchem, and with the insightful research of Livia Garofalo, Joan Mukogosi, Robyn Caplan, and Tiara Roxane, this team has gone on to investigate the role of data centers in rural communities, AI and the sacred, and AI in therapy chatbots. I feel incredibly lucky to have been a part of the beginnings of this vital work.

While at Data & Society, I learned what kinds of platforms and support being a public intellectual requires–and the many paths to doing so. I’ve honed my skills by contributing to discussions in public about caste and technology, through the Tech Policy Press, for instance, and by thinking about multiple channels and audiences for my work, from the classroom to policy documents.

Now, in my position in Strategic Design and Anthropology at The New School, I also think about students as a vital audience shaping the future of emerging technologies.