I research technology and work in a global context. I primarily use qualitative methods including ethnography, interviews, design research, participant observation, and archival review. My scholarly work is in conversation with the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and design. I also contribute to popular conversations about the changing nature of work and the ethical dimensions of emerging technologies. My work has policy, programmatic, and technology design implications that I have researched with, presented to, and/or implemented with international development organizations (e.g. UNICEF, Clinton Health Access Initiative), tech companies (e.g. Facebook), and civil service organizations (e.g., informal sector union in Phnom Penh, Media Safe Cambodia, Urban Justice Center NYC, Queens Memory Project). I have received funding for my research from the National Science Foundation, Intel, Cornell’s Einaudi Center for International Studies, Women in Technology New York, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Public Affairs, and others.
CURRENT PROJECTS
NeighborhoodS-TS
I use a transnational & feminist STS perspective to research the changing geography of New York City: how are neighborhoods, livelihoods and technologies co-creating each other? For instance, between 2020 and 2022, I researched street vendors, mutual aid networks, and food pantries to understand the grassroots, ad hoc logistics networks that responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. These networks acted as alternatives to what I call ‘mega-logistics,’ consolidated logistics that are increasing intertwined with the technology industry (e.g. Amazon). They demonstrated interlocking forms of environmental and social sustainability but met regulatory friction & were fleeting. This work was funded by a John Burdick mini-grant for Research on Social Movements and Social Change, Syracuse University Maxwell School. In addition to a continued interest in urban logisitcs, I am also currently researching urban agriculture and urban environmental activism.
Related Past Project Publications:
Creative Work/Life
I research the changing nature of work: the concomitant forces of new technologies and political-economic structures like neoliberalism, as well as the tensions between increased worker autonomy and the felt experience of precarity/anxiety (and other affective responses). As an ethnographer, I am interested in exploring these phenomena via qualitative methods to glean an understanding of the lived experience of workers. For instance, between 2020 and 2023, I conducted and analzyed two interview-diary studies about the way independent workers in the creative and knowledge industries integrate their professional and non-professional lives. I also developed and facilitated a design workshop in May 2024 in which independent creative workers shared about the challenges they face, the workarounds they have developed to make their work-lives doable, and what they imagine for the future. This project is growing out of my postdoc funded by NSF grant 1928573 “Augmenting Work,” with Melissa Mazmanian and Ingrid Erickson.
Publication:
Hillary Abraham, Margaret Jack, Melissa Mazmanian, Ingrid Erickson, Charis Owuraku Asante-Agyei, Jina Hong. “More than Temporal Control: Forms of Agency That Matter to High-Skilled Independent Workers” Proceedings of Academy of Management Conference, Organizational Communication and Information Systems Division. 2021. Published in Best Paper Proceedings – 10% accepted papers.
PAST PROJECTS
Global Politics and Technology
My work also addresses the ways that global politics intersect with sociotechnical infrastructures. My paper “The Feminist Geopolitics of Technology” (with Seyram Avle) describes what happens in the margins of competing dominant techno-empires. We look at how technologists survive/thrive in Cambodia and Ghana, where they are experiencing increased oppression in the digital sphere from domestic governments as well as Chinese and American states and corporations. We use feminist theory to attend to these technologists’ grounded practices of everyday life and the power of community building in the face of challenging geopolitical pressures. I have also studied the ways that rural government workers instil fear in citizens by using new digital tools to enact older forms of authoritarian control.
Publications:
Privacy & Information Control
I have also investigated questions of privacy and misinformation in global contexts. My research has shown that understandings of privacy are culturally specific and that Facebook (the most popular platform in the Global South) has poorly translated its user interface (particularly its privacy tools) into minority languages. These conditions open up huge vulnerabilities for people who do not speak English and have low technology literacy. An outcome of the project was the development and facilitation of media literacy trainings both in Phnom Penh and in a Cambodian rural site. I have also been a supporting author on a paper related to the ways that misinformation is culturally specific in China; this paper showed that social media users in China have increased trust in and are more likely to share positive affect-laden speech (i.e., text with “positive energy”).
Publications:
“Localization of Transnational Technology Platforms and Liminal Privacy Practices in Cambodia,” Margaret Jack, Pang Sovannaroth, Nicola Dell, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, November 2019 (recognized for contributions to diversity and inclusion at CSCW)