Social & Cultural Studies

Related Faculty

Alumni (MIMS 2006)
Assistant Professor of Practice
Science and technology studies; computer-supported cooperative work and social computing; education; anthropology; youth technocultures; ideology and inequity; critical data science
Adjunct Professor
how systematically excluded communities adopt technology and adapt it to their needs, human control over algorithms, ethnography
Professor
Trust, social exchange, social psychology, and information exchange
Dean & Chancellor’s Professor of Social Informatics
Social informatics, digital transformation, knowledge, data

Recent Publications

This paper introduces "infrastructural speculations," an orientation towards speculation that aims to interrogate and ask questions about the broader lifeworld within which speculative artifacts sit, placing the lifeworld (rather than an individual artifact) at the center of a designer's concern. 

In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why — despite its failures — the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development.

Professionals tasked with preserving online security hope to use new machine-learning based techniques to develop a “fairer” system to determine patterns of “good” and “bad” usage, moving beyond regional blocking. However, we argue that these systems may continue to embed unequal treatments, and troublingly may further disguise such discrimination behind more complex and less transparent automated assessment.

What can machines know about the mind? This dissertation seeks to understand people’s beliefs about this question: how these beliefs affect and arise from interactions with digital sensors, from prior beliefs about the mind and the body; and how these beliefs may shape the design of technical systems in the future.

The purpose of this dissertation is twofold. First, it surfaces that the boundary between sensing bodies and sensing minds is unstable, deeply entangled with social context and beliefs about the body and mind. Second, it proposes the porousness of this boundary as a site for studying the role that biosensing devices will play in near future. As biosensors creep into smart watches, bands, and ingestibles, their ability to divine not just what these bodies do, but what they think and feel, presents an under-explored avenue for understanding and imagining how thesetechnologies will come to matter in the course of life.

We investigate cybersecurity toolkits, collections of public facing materials intended to help users achieve security online. We look at design dimensions of these toolkits, and investigate how the toolkits construct security as a value and how they construct people as (in)secure users.

Social & Cultural Studies news

The School of Information is offering a new class this semester, Antiracism in Technology, open to all I School students.

Prof. Salehi was awarded $100K from Facebook Research to study how Muslim Americans adopt counter-narratives online, empowering and giving voice to an often denigrated population.

The sudden need for distance education relates to ongoing research by Prof. Jenna Burrell, Anne Jonas, Prof. Morgan G. Ames, who explore inequality and digitization in educational spaces.

Associate Professor Jenna Burrell and Ph.D. student Elizabeth Resor Receive Google Faculty Award.