Attended NYU Public Interest Technology Institute - June-July 2021

I attended the workshop at NYU on public interest technology for early to mid-career academics. I’m grateful for the organizers especially Professor Meredith Broussard for bringing in interesting speakers and hosting workshop. I was able to meet many renowned sociologists and technologists at the conference including Safiya Noble, Sarah Jackson, Charlton McIlwain, Cathy O’Neil and so on. Besides being in awe of meeting authors whose work I’ve heard long about, I was impressed by their commitment to grounding the work in gender politics and critical race theory.

It was refreshing for me to hear from sociologists as someone whose social science background is in political science and economics, because the “orthodox” theoretical frameworks and toolkits (cost benefit analyses, political viability analysis etc) are so different across the disciplines. I particularly enjoyed the dicussions around activism and collective actions which are severely under rated by methodological individualists in economics. The conversations also helped me critically examine the ethical decisions that researchers such as myself have to make in deciding what/how to study particular topics. For example, is it ethical to publish a work on Black creators’ boycott (refraining from work) on a social media platform?

Lastly, it was extremely useful to hear senior academics talk about preparing for publication and job market…