معرفی
Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. She holds multiple interdisciplinary affiliations including Science Studies, the Design Lab, the Institute for Practical Ethics, and Critical Gender Studies. As Faculty Director of the UC San Diego Labor Center and co-director of the Just Transitions Initiative, she plays a significant role in shaping labor and technology policy discussions at the university and beyond.
Dr. Irani's educational background includes a Ph.D. in Informatics (with Feminist Emphasis) from UC Irvine, and both an M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction. Her unique combination of technical training and social science expertise informs her research approach, bridging practical design work with critical analysis of technology systems.
Her research investigates the cultural politics of high-tech work practices with a focus on how actors produce "innovation" cultures. She specializes in the cultural politics of high-tech work in the context of South Asian development and global AI economies. As an ethnographer of work, she analyzes interactional, organizational, and cultural dynamics as mediated by technology. Her work draws on and contributes to Science and Technology Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, and South Asia studies, with particular attention to how technological systems create and reinforce hierarchies of value, gender, race, and cultural positioning.
Dr. Irani's publications reveal consistent engagement with issues of digital labor, platform economies, and the politics of innovation. Her work shows a trajectory from examining specific platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk to broader critiques of innovation culture and entrepreneurial citizenship, with recurring themes of worker power, surveillance, and democratic control of technology.
- 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award
- 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize
- Honorable mention at CHI 2019
Dr. Irani has received research funding from prestigious organizations including the Ford Foundation, Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellowship, Open Society Foundation, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and NSF Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems Program. She serves on the editorial advisory boards of Design and Culture, New Technology, Work, and Employment, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and is part of the editorial collective of Public Culture. Collaboratively, she has designed software tools like Turkopticon and Dynamo that intervene in and demonstrate alternatives to existing platforms, with Turkopticon evolving into a worker-run advocacy organization.
Her research group and collaborations span multiple disciplines, working closely with scholars in Science and Technology Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, and labor studies. The Just Transitions Initiative she co-directs represents a significant ongoing project focused on democratic control of technology and worker power in the digital economy.
