Steve Jackson

Steve Jackson is a Professor of Information Science and Science and Technology Studies, with additional graduate field appointments in Communication and Public Affairs. He’s also the former Chair of Information Science and former Dean of William Keeton House. Since July 2023, he has also served as Vice-Provost for Academic Innovation at Cornell.  

Dr. Jackson teaches and conducts research in the areas of technology ethics, law and policy; maintenance, repair and sustainability; and technology, inequality and global development. His work is shaped by ideas coming out of American pragmatism, political economy, and science and technology studies, along with analytic traditions coming from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, media studies, law, and information science sub-fields like human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. He’s especially interested in places where new computing practices meet social and material worlds, with implications for infrastructure, collaboration, sustainability, global change, inequality, and cultural practice (including in music and art). He’s also interested in places where computing meets unsettled legal, institutional, and ethical terrains, and the processes by which these encounters get structured, codified, normalized, and reduced. His research with students and collaborators has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (including an NSF CAREER award), the Social Science Research Council, Ford Foundation, Sloan Foundation, World Bank, Intel Research, Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council. He has published more than 90 peer reviewed papers, given keynotes and invited talks around the world, and has received more than twenty paper awards at leading venues in the computing and information science fields. His most recent venture is the Computing On Earth Lab, an experimental collaboration that brings together social scientists, humanists, artists and engineers to rethink the material and planetary foundations of computing.

Some recent publications: 

• Steven J. Jackson, Jen Liu, Ranjit Singh, and Samir Passi, “Maintaining Data Infrastructures,” in International Handbook of Data and Society, eds. Jean-Cristophe Plantin, Amelia Acker, Tommaso Venturini and Antonia Walford. Sage: London, 2024 (forthcoming). 
• Steven J. Jackson, “Ordinary Hope,” in Maddalena Taccheti, Dimitris Papadopoulos, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, eds. Ecological Reparation: Repair, Remediation and Resurgence in Social and Environmental Conflict. Bristol University Press: Bristol, 2023. 

https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/Jackson_OrdinaryHope(EcologicalReparation2023).pdf

• Cindy Lin and Steven J. Jackson, “From Bias to Repair: Error as a Site of Negotiation and Collaboration in Applied Data Science Work,” in Proceedings of the 2023 Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference, Hamburg, Germany, April 2023. 

https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/Lin&Jackson_FromBiastoRepair(CHI2023).pdf 

• Samar Sabie, Robert Soden, Steven J. Jackson, and Tapan Parikh, “Unmaking as Emancipation: Lessons and Reflections from Luddism,” in Proceedings of the 2023 Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference, Hamburg, Germany, April 2023. 

https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/Sabieetal_UnmakingasEmancipation(CHI2023).pdf 

• Palashi Vaghela, Steven J. Jackson, and Phoebe Sengers, “Interrupting Merit, Subverting Legibility: Navigating Caste in ‘Casteless’ Worlds of Computing,” in Proceedings of the 2022 Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference, New Orleans, LA, May 2022. 

https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/VaghelaJacksonSengers_InterruptingMeritSubvertingLegibility(CHI2022).pdf 

• Laewoo Kang, Steven J. Jackson, and Trevor Pinch, “The Electronicists: Techno-Aesthetic Encounters for Non-Linear and Art-Based Inquiry in HCI,” in Proceedings of the 2022 Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference, New Orleans, LA, May 2022. 

https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/KangJacksonPinch_TheElectronicists(CHI2022).pdf 

• Samar Sabie, Steven J. Jackson, Wendy Ju and Tapan Parikh, “(Un)Making as Agonism: Using Participatory Design with Youth to Surface Difference in an Urban Context,” in Proceedings of the 2022 Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference, New Orleans, LA, May 2022. 

https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/Sabieetal_UnmakingasAgonism(CHI2022).pdf 

• Steven J. Jackson and Lara Houston, “The Poetics and Political Economy of Repair,” in Janet Wasko and Jeremy Schwartz, eds. Media: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry. Intellect Books / University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2021. 

https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/Jackson&Houston_PoeticsandPoliticalEconomyofRepair(2021).pdf 

• Ranjit Singh and Steven J. Jackson, “Seeing Like an Infrastructure: Low Resolution Citizens and the Aadhaar Identification Project,” in Proceedings of the 2021 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Conference, virtual, October 2021.   

https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/Singh&Jackson_SeeingLikeanInfrastructure(CSCW2021).pdf 

• Margaret C. Jack, Sopheak Chann, Nicola Dell, and Steven J. Jackson, “Networked Authoritarianism: The Digital and Political Transitions of Cambodian Village Officials,” in Proceedings of the 2021 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Conference, virtual, October 2021. 

https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/Jacketal_NetworkedAuthoritarianismattheEdge(CSCW2021).pdf 

• Laewoo Kang and Steven J. Jackson, “Tech-Art-Theory: Improvisational Methods for HCI Teaching and Learning,” in Proceedings of the 2021 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Conference, virtual, October, 2021. 

https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/Kang&Jackson_TechArtTheory(CSCW2021).pdf