I am an interpretive social scientist interested in understanding how our new computing infrastructures of humans, algorithms, software, and data (or “AI”) are changing labor, work practices, and expertise.
I’m working on a manuscript tentatively titled “Reinventing Expertise: Technology Reformers and the Platformization of Higher Education” based on my dissertation. Building on my fieldwork in the world of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), it describes how and why the new practices of “data science” and “design thinking” are becoming more attractive to reformers of various sorts. I argue that these new regimes of knowledge production reconfigure our notions of educational expertise.
My work has been mentioned in the Financial Times and Harvard Business Review. Also The Age of the Algorithm (Italian translation)
My CV.
I am a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major (ISF) at the University of California, Berkeley.
I finished my PhD at MIT’s Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS). I also have a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and a Bachelors in Electronics from VJTI, Mumbai.
Somewhere in there, I worked as a computer scientist for Avaya Research and as a summer intern ethnographer for Xerox.