Invited Speakers
Vikram Subramanian is a Software Engineer based in in Zurich, Switzerland. He is an an Ex-Google employee who till recently worked in Google for 10+ years. He has been organizing tech workers via No Tech for Apartheid for over a year trying to get Google to cancel Project Nimbus, the 1.2 billion dollar Cloud contract between Google, Amazon and the Israeli government & military.
JS Tan is a PhD student at MIT and a member of Collective Action in Tech. He is a former tech worker.
Daniel Greene is an Associate Professor of Information at the University of Maryland and Vice President of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors. As an interpretive social scientist, his ethnographic, historical, and theoretical research explores how the future of work is built and who is included (or not) in that future. Daniel’s first book, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, was published by the MIT Press in 2021. It received the McGannon Book Award for the best book published in 2021 concerning media policy, activism, and social justice. His research has also appeared in such journals as Research in the Sociology of Work, New Media & Society, and Big Data & Society.
Joan Greenbaum has worked with, and written about, technology since getting hooked on programming in the early mainframe computer days with IBM. She is the author of Windows on the Workplace, Design at Work, and In the Name of Efficiency, and is Professor Emerita at City University of New York (CUNY), where she is on the faculty of Environmental Psychology.
Lucy Suchman is professor emerita of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. Previous to her tenure at Lancaster University, she was the Principal Scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center PARC). She is the author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007) and Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1987). Her research works at the intersections of anthropology and the field of feminist science and technology studies, focused on the sociotechnical imaginaries, material practices, and politics of technology design. Her current research extends her longstanding critical engagement with the fields of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction to the domain of contemporary militarism. She is concerned with the question of whose bodies are incorporated into military systems, how and with what consequences for social justice and the possibility for a less violent world.
Workshop Organizers
Cella M. Sum is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Her research focuses on technology, power, and resistance in labor contexts. Using community-based participatory design methods, she works with affected communities to co-create more just alternatives. She is an organizer with Against Carceral Tech, a member of Collective Action in Tech, and a former tech worker organizer with Big Cartel Workers Union.
Christoph Becker is Professor at the Faculty of Information and a Fellow of the SDG Scholars Academy at the University of Toronto. He leads the Just Sustainability Design lab (www.justsustainabilitydesign.org). With a background in computer science and informatics, his research today focuses on enacting meaningful change in computing to meet the urgent need for sustainability and social justice (converging in just sustainability) at a time when the world is grappling with unprecedented ecological, political and societal crises. His book Insolvent: How to reorient computing for just sustainability appeared at MIT Press in 2023.
Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar is a Colombian researcher and designer working on research surrounding how robotics and other automated systems intersect with society. This includes aspects of its design, dissemination, regulation and further integration in sociotechnical environments. This research is built on methods from Participatory Design, Science, Technology and Society studies, and Human-Computer Interaction. It is grounded in principles of participation, justice, and accountability.
Lynn Dombrowski uses design and empirical methods to explore how computing technologies might address social inequality. She designs and prototypes human-centered computing technologies for intervening in large systemic social issues like social and economic inequalities (e.g., hunger; wage violations). Her work contributes to the fields of human-computer interaction, ubiquitous and social computing, and design. She explores themes of power, empowerment, politics, ethics, values, advocacy, and social justice within the context of sociotechnical systems.
Dr. Peaks Krafft (they/them) is Lecturer in Computational Sociology and Co-Director of the MSc Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Peaks engages in social justice-oriented computing research and organising.
Jensine Raihan (they/she) is an Informatics PhD student at University of California, Irvine. They hold a BS in computer science from New York University and worked as a community organizer building abolitionist systems to address gender-based violence within working-class Desi communities in New York City. Their research lies at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, Participatory Design and Postcolonial Theory, focusing on the conditions of subjective formation that support genuine democratic participation in society and emancipatory technological design.
Alicia DeVrio is a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Her research explores how structurally disempowered people use their own counter-power to resist ordinary and harmful impacts of algorithmic systems.
Linda Huber is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, where she researches how emerging digital technologies are reshaping business models and organizational practices. Using ethnographic methods, her work focuses on datafication and platformization in the healthcare industry, contributing to feminist science and technology studies (STS), organization studies, and critical data studies. She is also an organizer in tech-ademia, and has been leading the roving "ACM Strike School" since 2022.
Maggie Hughes is a designer and researcher exploring technologies that support democratic practice and grassroots power building through community-centered design and participatory research. As a Ph.D. candidate at MIT Media Lab's Center for Constructive Communication and Microsoft Sociotechnical Systems Fellow, she collaborates with local organizers on initiatives like Real Talk in Boston and has designed systems to increase transparency and accountability in governance through the Voice-to-Insights project with the NYC Department of City Planning. Her work spans teaching alongside Marshall Ganz in Harvard's People, Power, Change and co-designing MIT's Designing Constructive Communication Systems course.