ABOUT
Sarah Myers West has over a decade of experience working at the intersection of tech, labor and platform accountability. Her current project examines histories of resistance and organizing in the tech industry, positioning today's wave of tech worker organizing in a long trajectory of labor and social movements. As one of the creators of the Santa Clara Principles, her award-winning work also critically examines the political economy of technology companies.
She received her doctoral degree in 2018 from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She has published her writing in journals including New Media & Society, Social Studies of Science, the International Journal of Communication, Policy & Internet and Business and Society, and her research is featured in the Wall Street Journal, PBS, CBS, the Associated Press, and Motherboard, among others.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
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Who Is a Tech Worker?: The Global Ecosystem of Tech Labor (forthcoming, with Meredith Whittaker).
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Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race and Power in AI. AI Now Institute.
Best Paper Award 2020
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Raging Against the Machine: Collective Action on Social Media Platforms. Media and Communication.
SELECTED
TALKS
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“Workers, Cities, and Tech Decolonization” – Naomi Klein’s The Corporate Self,
Rutgers University, Nov. 2020
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“Tech | Work” – Tandon School of Engineering
New York University, Feb. 2020
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"Discriminating Systems" –
National Science Policy Network Annual Symposium, Nov. 2020;
Indiana Informatics Colloquium Series, University of Indiana, September 2020;
Gender Equality Academy Series, European Union Horizon 2020, July 2020;
Ethics and Technological Futures Lecture Series, Georgia Tech, February 2020;
The Humanistic Dimensions of Artificial Intelligence Lecture Series, Carleton College, January 2020;
Feminist and Accessible Publishing and Communications Technologies Speaker and Workshop Series, McGill University, September 2019;
Equity, Diversity and Data Science in Genomics Workshop, National Human Genome Research Institute, September 2019;
Women in Tech Roundtable Series, University of California Berkeley, June 2019;
Microsoft FATE Research Group, May 2019