Steven Jackson

Professor

Overview

I’m a 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 have served as past Chair of Information Science; Dean of William Keeton House, a vibrant living-learning community that's part of Cornell’s West Campus housing system; and since July 2023, as Vice-Provost for Academic Innovation at Cornell. I also direct the Computing On Earth Lab, dedicated to investigating the planetary dimensions and consequences of computing, from problems of sourcing and extraction, to energy and water consumption, to technology waste and repair.

I teach and conduct research in the areas of sustainability; scientific collaboration; technology ethics, law and policy; and global change and inequality. 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, organizational or institutional analysis, and occasionally into design. I think a lot about governance: how order is produced and maintained in complex sociotechnical systems; collaboration: the practices (sometimes contentious) by which divergent interests and perspectives are brought into more or less durable forms of alignment; time: how we experience, organize, 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.

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. Mostly that means ethnography, usually of the sort practiced in STS, qualitative sociology or anthropology; but it also draws on allied traditions of work in phenomenology, ethnomethodology, art and design practice, and interpretivist strains of information science sub-fields like Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. 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?).

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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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

STS Courses - Fall 2023

STS 6991 : Graduate Independent Study

STS Courses - Spring 2024

STS 4260 : Computing On Earth: Planetary Dimensions and Consequence of Computing