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Anita Say Chan

Profile picture for Anita Say Chan

Contact Information

228 Gregory Hall
810 S. Wright St.
M/C 462
Urbana, IL 61801

Associate Professor

Biography

Anita Say Chan is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and the College of Media at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She also holds the Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellowship at the National Centerfor Supercomputing Applications at UIUC. Her research and teaching interestsinclude globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the “periphery”, science and technology studies in Latin America, and hybridpedagogies in building digital literacies. She received her PhD in 2008 fromthe MIT Doctoral Programs in History; Anthropology; and Science, Technology, and Society. Her first book on 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, and was released in Spanish by the Institute of Peruvian Studies in 2018. 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. She is faculty affiliate at the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (I-CHASS), the Illinois Informatics Institute, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and theCollaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy (CHAMP). She is a2018-19 Faculty Fellow with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities' Training in Digital Methods for the Humanities Program, and a 2017-19 Faculty Fellow with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.

Research Interests

Anita Say Chan’s work on the use of intellectual property rights in international development and network politics has been published in the journals Science Studies, Anthropological Quarterly, and the Revista Iberoamericana de Comunicación. Her research has been awarded support from the National Science Foundation and the Center for the Study of Law & Culture at Columbia University’s School of Law. She has also held a postdoctoral fellowship with Stanford University’s Introduction to Humanities Program. Prior to entering academia, Chan worked in print and broadcast journalism, and her writing can be found published in The Village Voice, The Star-Ledger, and A. Magazine

Education

Ph.D., Program in the History and Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Society, MIT
S.M., Program in Comparative Media Studies, MIT
B.A., Journalism and Women's Studies, New York University

Additional Campus Affiliations

Associate Professor, Media and Cinema Studies
Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences
Associate Professor, Institute of Communications Research
Associate Professor, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Associate Professor, Asian American Studies
Associate Professor, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Associate Professor, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

Highlighted Publications

Chan, A. (2014). Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism. MIT Press.

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Recent Publications

Bosch, N., Chan, A. S., Davis, J. L., Gutiérrez, R., He, J. R., Karahalios, K., Loui, M. C., Mendenhall, R., Sanfilippo, M. R., Tong, H., Varshney, L. R., & Wang, Y. (2022). Artificial Intelligence and Social Responsibility: The Roles of the University. Computing Research Association. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116374

Chan, A. S. (2021). Data Journalism, Digital Universalism and Innovation in the Periphery. In L. Bounegru, & J. Gray (Eds.), The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards A Critical Data Practice (pp. 307-313). Article 43. Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1qr6smr.46

Chan, A. S., & Bakry, M. E. (2020). Feminist design and the relational infrastructures of protest. Interactions, 27(6), 31-35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3425913

Garcia, P., Sutherland, T., Cifor, M., Chan, A. S., Klein, L., D'Ignazio, C., & Salehi, N. (2020). No: Critical Refusal as Feminist Data Practice. In CSCW 2020 Companion - Conference Companion Publication of the 2020 Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 199-202). (Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406865.3419014

Chan, A. S. (2019). Venture Ed: Recycling Hype, Fixing Futures, and the Temporal Order of Edtech. In J. Vertesi, & D. Ribes (Eds.), digitalSTS: A Field Guide for Science & Technology Studies (pp. 161-177). Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc77mp9.16

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