danah boyd and Colette Perold on the federal bureaucracy

danah boyd is the Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology and society, with an eye towards how structural inequities shape and are shaped by sociotechnical systems. Her upcoming book Data are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census is an ethnography of the US Census Bureau, Jenga politics, and the struggle to make democracy’s data. She has also conducted research on media manipulation, privacy practices, social media, and teen culture. Her monograph It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens has received widespread praise. She founded the research institute Data & Society, where she currently serves as an advisor. She is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Georgetown University, a fellow of AAAS, a non-residential fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a trustee of the Computer History Museum, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and on the advisory board of Electronic Privacy Information Center. Previously, she worked at Microsoft Research. She received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown University, a master’s degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Ph.D in Information from the University of California, Berkeley.

Colette Perold researches the relationship between media technologies, labor and U.S. foreign policy, specifically the ways in which multinational IT companies shape U.S. foreign policy priorities in Latin America. Her current project draws from the business history of computing and political economy of media industries to analyze the relationship between the U.S.-based IT sector and U.S. foreign policy in Brazil prior to modern computing. Her research has been funded by various sources including the Hagley Library, the Tinker Foundation, and the Charles Babbage Institute, where she received the 2019-2020 Tomash Fellowship. She most recently received the 2022-2023 Brooke Hindle Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Society for the History of Technology.