Anita Say Chan

Associate Professor

PhD, History and Anthropology of Science and Technology Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Room 5145, 614 E. Daniel St.

(217) 333-1549

achan@illinois.edu

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

Science and technology studies, globalization and innovation economies, critical data studies, feminist and decolonial approaches to technology, data ethics and cultures.

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.