Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant to spend three weeks at Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. During her visit, which will take place in May 2020, Chan will lecture on feminist data methods and give a workshop on community data.
"I'm thrilled to be able to share the innovative interdisciplinary work in civic and community data methods we are cultivating at the Community Data Clinic at Illinois and to work with the talented faculty, students, and researchers in the Communication, Languages, and Information doctoral program at Javeriana," she said.
Chan noted her upcoming work in Colombia is reflective of the iSchool's commitment to building global research networks for collaboration and exchange around varied social justice projects.
"I am also excited to be able to use the time to deepen my research on and with feminist data justice networks addressing feminicide and online gender-based harassment in the region," Chan said. "Their research practices and outreach methods to extend the visibility of their data resources have undoubtedly been some of the most impactful cases that scholars have seen emerge in any global context."
Chan's research and teaching interests include globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the "periphery," science and technology studies global contexts, and feminist and decolonial approaches to technology. Her book, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism (MIT Press, 2014), addresses the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru.
Chan is a 2019-2020 Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and a 2019-2020 Faculty Fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute in New York City. At Illinois, she directs the interdisciplinary Technocultures Lab in Department of Media and Cinema Studies and is a faculty affiliate at the Illinois Informatics Institute, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Center for Global Studies, Department of Anthropology, and Department of Asian American Studies. Chan received her PhD from MIT in the history and anthropology of science and technology studies.