Steven Jackson

Overview

I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science and Department of Science and Technology Studies, with additional graduate field appointments in Communication and Public Affairs.  I also serve as Chair of Information Science, and Dean of William Keeton House, a vibrant living-learning community that's part of Cornell’s West Campus housing system.

I teach and conduct research in the areas of scientific collaboration, technology policy, democratic governance, and global development. More specifically, I study how people organize, fight, and work together around collective projects of all sorts in which technology plays a central role. I also study how infrastructure – social and material forms foundational to other kinds of human action – gets built, stabilized, and sometimes undone. This brings me regularly into worlds of policy (especially technology, research, and development policy), organizational or institutional analysis, and occasionally into design. I spend much of my time doing ethnographic and sometimes historiographic research, where I study how shifting policies, emerging technologies, and cultural innovation meet complex and historically-layered fields of practice. I think a lot about governance – how order is produced and maintained in complex sociotechnical systems; time – how we experience, organize, design, and work around the temporal flows and patterns that shape and define individual and collective activity in the world; and breakdown, maintenance and repair – as sites of innovation, power, and ethics in complex sociotechnical systems.  At the broadest level, I study how things change and how they stay the same, in a world that is furiously doing both (piece of cake, right?).

Research Focus

My research connects contemporary questions in information science to theoretical and methodological traditions grounded in the critical, interpretive, and historical social sciences. I have particular interest in questions of technology governance, in both its formal (how we make and fight about the laws, rules and policies that shape emerging technologies) and informal dimensions (how new technologies shape, change, or reinforce existing social norms, rules and expectations). This leads me to an active research and teaching program in technology law and policy (especially innovation, research, telecommunications, and development policies). I also care a lot about knowledge: how it’s produced and sustained; who owns it; how it feeds into collective decisions; and how it might be changing, including through the introduction of new information and computational forms. And I’m interested in collaboration – the ongoing miracle (!) by which divergent interests and perspectives are brought into alignment in the interest of more and less durable forms of collective action (and again, how collaboration might be changing, including through the use of new information and computational tools).     

Theoretically, my work is shaped by ideas and empirical traditions coming out of American pragmatism, critical theory, and post-structuralism. Methodologically, I’m most informed by research traditions dedicated to the naturalistic understanding of order, value, and meaning as defining attributes of human activity in the world – a point which most definitely includes what we do with, to, and through our tools. Mostly that means ethnography, usually of the sort practiced in qualitative sociology and anthropology; but it also draws on allied traditions of work in phenomenology, ethnomethodology, critical theory, science and technology studies (STS), some forms of cultural studies and art practice, and interpretivist strains of information science sub-fields like Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.

Publications

• Steven J. Jackson and Lara Houston, “Beyond Design: The Poetics and Political Economy of Repair,” in Janet Wasko and Jeremy Schwartz, eds. What is Media?. University of Chicago Press: Chicago (forthcoming).
• Steven J. Jackson, “Repair as Transition: Time, Materiality, and Hope,” in Ignaz Strebel, Alain Bovet, and Philippe Sormani, eds. Repair Work Ethnographies: What Happens When Things Break Down, Palgrave Macmillan: London (forthcoming).
• Steven J. Jackson, “Material Care,” in Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein, eds. Debates in the Digital Humanities.  University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2018.
• Steven J. Jackson, “Speed Time Infrastructure: Temporalities of Breakdown, Maintenance and Repair,” in Judy Wajcman and Nigel Dodd, eds. The Sociology of Speed.  Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2017.
• Steven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot, eds. Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society.  MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 2014.
• Steven J. Jackson and Sarah Barbrow, “Standards and/as Innovation: Protocols, Creativity, and Interactive Systems Development in Ecology,” in Proceedings of the 2015 Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference, Seoul, April 2015.
• Steven J. Jackson, "Breakdown, Obsolescence and Reuse: HCI and the Art of Repair," in Proceedings of the 2014 Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference, Toronto, Canada, April 29-May 2, 2014.
• Steven J. Jackson, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, and Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat, "Learning, Innovation, and Sustainability Among Mobile Phone Repairers in Dhaka, Bangladesh," in Proceedings of the 2014 Designing Interactive Systems Converence, Vancouver, June 2014.
• Steven J. Jackson, Tarleton Gillespie, and Sandra Payette, “The Policy Knot: Reintegrating Policy, Practice and Design in CSCW Studies of Social Computing,” in Proceedings of the 2014 Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Conference, Baltimore, MD, Feb 2014.
• Steven J. Jackson and Ayse Buyuktur, “Who Killed WATERS?  Mess, Method, and the Forensic Imagination in the Making and Unmaking of Large-Scale Science Networks,” Science, Technology and Human Values 39:2 (March 2014), pp 285-308.
• Steven J. Jackson and Sarah Barbrow, “Infrastructure and Vocation: Field, Calling, and Computation in Ecology,” in Proceedings of the 2013 Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference, Paris, France, April 27-30, 2013.
• Steven J. Jackson, Stephanie Steinhardt, and Ayse Buyuktur, “Why CSCW Needs Science Policy (and Vice-Versa),” in Proceedings of the 2013 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Conference, San Antonio, Texas, Feb 23-27, 2013.
• Steven J. Jackson, Alex Pompe and Gabriel Krieshok, “Repair Worlds: Maintenance, Repair, and ICT for Development in Rural Namibia,” in Proceedings of the 2012 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Conference, Seattle, Washington, Feb 11-15, 2012.
• Steven J. Jackson, David Ribes, Ayse Buyuktur, and Geoffrey C. Bowker, “Collaborative Rhythm: Temporal Dissonance and Alignment in Distributed Scientific Work,” in Proceedings of the 2011 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Conference, Hangzhou, China, March 20—23, 2011.
• Steven J. Jackson, Paul N. Edwards, Geoffrey C. Bowker, and Cory Knobel, “Understanding Infrastructure: History, Heuristics, and Cyberinfrastructure Policy,” in B. Kahin and S.J. Jackson, eds. “Special Issue: Designing Cyberinfrastructure for Collaboration and Innovation,” First Monday 12:6 (June 2007).
• Steven J. Jackson, “Water Models and Water Politics: Deliberative Design and Virtual Accountability,” in Proceedings of the 2006 Digital Government Conference, San Diego, May 22-24, 2006
• Steven J. Jackson, “Ex-Communication: Competition and Collusion in the U.S. Prison Telephone Industry,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22:4 (October, 2005).

In the news

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