Social & Cultural Studies

Related Faculty

Morgan G. Ames

Morgan Ames

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
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Jenna Burrell

Adjunct Professor
how systematically excluded communities adopt technology and adapt it to their needs, human control over algorithms, ethnography
Coye Cheshire

Coye Cheshire

Professor
Trust, social exchange, social psychology, and information exchange
photo of Eric Meyer smiling with arms crossed wearing a suit and yellow tie

Eric T. Meyer

Dean & Chancellor’s Professor of Social Informatics
Social informatics, digital transformation, knowledge, data

Recent Publications

When a Product Is Still Fictional: Anticipating and Speculating Futures through Concept Videos

We analyze the concept videos of Google Glass and Microsoft Hololens, viewing them as design fictions that project a vision about the future of computing. Analyzing these videos along with media articles during the time period after the products were announced but before they were available to the public, we begin to see how people use the videos to imagine different types of futures - including imagining different implications that these technologies might have on privacy.

robots.txt: An Ethnographic Investigation of Automated Software Agents in User-Generated Content Platforms
The Ageing of Information
The Myth of Market Price Information: Mobile Phones and the Application of Economic Knowledge in ICTD
Wireless Visions: Infrastructure, Imagination, and US Spectrum Policy
From Farm to Farmville: Circulation, Adoption, and Use of ICT between Urban and Rural China
Revisiting the Fishers of Kerala, India
Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana.
The political life of information: “Information” and the practice of governance in India
None of us is as lazy as all of us: Social Intelligence and Loafing in Information Pools

Social & Cultural Studies news

Marc Faddoul UC Berkeley AI researcher
Alumnus Marc Faddoul Cautious of COVID-19 Conspiracies on Social Media
In-person classes are canceled at Berkeley but my class recordings still go on at the same place at the same time, so I give an NLP performance to an empty room.
David Bamman Lectures to an Empty Room
The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child
Morgan Ames’s Charisma Machine Featured in Los Angeles Review of Books

Ames uses the One Laptop Per Child Program to explore the “complicated consequences of technological utopianism.”

Shazeda Ahmed
Shazeda Ahmed Explains the Chinese Social Credit System

A real life Black Mirror? Ph.D. student Shazeda Ahmed explains the Chinese Social Credit System.

Deirdre Mulligan
Deirdre Mulligan Wary of “Unknown Fund” and Blockchains
Ben Arnoldy
“Data for Good” Fellowship Awardee Fights Climate Change with Data Science Communications

MIDS student Ben Arnoldy has been awarded the Fall 2019 Jack Larson Data Science for Good Fellowship for his work involving the use of data science to educate the public on climate change and pollution.

Bloc by Bloc. Image courtesy of Harvard University Press.
Steven Weber Deconstructs the Future, Bloc by Bloc

In his newly published book, Bloc by Bloc, Professor Steven Weber explores the future of the global enterprise as international tensions reach new heights.

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child
Morgan Ames’ The Charisma Machine: A Deep Dive into One Laptop per Child

Morgan G. Ames explores the rise and fall of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project in her new book, The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child. 

Morgan G. Ames
Interview with Morgan Ames on “The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child”
Krista Mar
Alumna Krista Mar Seeks Fair Representation in the 2020 Census