Anita Say Chan
Associate Professor
PhD, History and Anthropology of Science and Technology Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Other professional appointments
- Associate Professor, Media + Cinema Studies
- Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellow, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
- Faculty Affiliate, Illinois Informatics Institute
- Faculty Affiliate, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
- Faculty Affiliate, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
- Faculty Affiliate, Center for Global Studies
- Faculty Affiliate, Department of Anthropology
- Faculty Affiliate, Department of Asian American Studies
Research focus
Biography
Anita Say Chan is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching interests include globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the “periphery”, science and technology studies in Latin America, and feminist and decolonial approaches to technology. She received her PhD in 2008 from the MIT Doctoral Program in History; Anthropology; and Science, Technology, and Society. Her first book the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism was released by MIT Press in 2014. Her research has been awarded support from the Center for the Study of Law & Culture at Columbia University’s School of Law and the National Science Foundation, and she has held postdoctoral fellowships at The CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization & Social Change, and at Stanford University’s Introduction to Humanities Program. She is a faculty affiliate at the Department of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She is a Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where she directs the Community Data Clinic. With colleagues in the Computer Science Department at UIUC, she co-leads the Just Infrastructures Initiative. She is a 2020–21 Faculty Affiliate with the Data & Society Research Institute, is a collaborator and co-author of the Feminist Data Manifest-NO project, and will be a Fulbright Specialist in Bogota, Colombia working on feminist data collectives in Latin America.
Courses currently teaching
Office hours
By appointment, please contact professor