Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, will present her research at the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020), to be held virtually on October 17-21. CSCW is the premier venue for experts from industry and academia to explore the technical, social, material, and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.
Chan will serve on the panel, No: Critical Refusal as Feminist Data Practice. During this session, panelists will perform a collective reading of the Feminist Data Manifest-No, a declaration that "refuses harmful data regimes and commits to new data futures," which Chan coauthored with Marika Cifor (University of Washington), Patricia Garcia (University of Michigan), TL Cowan (University of Toronto), Jasmine Rault (University of Toronto), Tonia Sutherland (University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa), Jennifer Rode (University College London), Anna Lauren Hoffmann (University of Washington), Niloufar Salehi (University of California, Berkeley), and Lisa Nakamura (University of Michigan). Following the reading, panelists will demonstrate how critical refusal can be used as a tool for creating alternative data practices.
Chan's research and teaching interests include globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the "periphery," science and technology studies in global contexts, and feminist and decolonial approaches to technology. At Illinois, she directs the interdisciplinary Community Data Clinic at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). She is a Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellow at the NCSA and a 2020-2021 Faculty Affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute in New York City. Chan received her PhD from MIT in the history and anthropology of science and technology studies.