About Me

Ethical, responsible, fair, just, inclusive, trustworthy, humane—these are the keywords transforming the ways we talk about and evaluate data and information technologies today. Investments in these concepts are driven, in part, by a recognition that data-driven, algorithmic, and informational processes can inflict harm; as guideposts, they offer hope that applications of data and information technologies can help foster a better future for many.

In practice, however, pursuing such lofty ideals is hardly straightforward. More immediately, they function as a means by which people articulate and contest competing visions of a good or just world. This struggle—over meanings and ethics attached to data and information technologies—has animated my research, and teaching for more than a decade. Throughout my work, I critically attend to the ways particular ethical and normative ideals shape our understandings of data and information technologies and their effects.

In particular, my research focuses on the ways ethics, values, and norms are (or are not) articulated relative to data and information technologies, with specific attention paid to 1) competing conceptions of justice and injustice, domination and subjugation, and inclusion and exclusion relative to data, information, and technology and 2) the ways they evoke or elide questions of gender, race, and other social organizing categories. Additionally, work and write on issues around ethics education for data professionals and computer scientists, focusing on the possibilities (and limits) of research ethics, ethics codes, and data metaphors for confronting the challenges posed by pervasive surveillance and processes like machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Currently, I am currently an Associate Professor with The Information School at the University of Washington, where I am also co-founder and co-director of AfterLab. I am also a senior fellow with the Center for Applied Transgender Studies and affiliate faculty with the UW iSchool’s DataLab. My writing and research has appeared in academic venues like New Media & Society, Review of Communication, JASIST, and Information, Communication, and Society. My work has also appeared The Guardian, Slate, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.