ABOUT
Dr. Sarah Myers West has over a decade of experience critically examining the political economy of the tech industry. Her award-winning research and writing blends social science, policy, and historical methods to address the intersection of technology, labor, and platform accountability. Her forthcoming book, Tracing Code (University of California Press), draws on years of historical and social scientific research to examine the cultural origins of cryptography.
Her writing is published in journals including Social Studies of Science, New Media & Society, 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.
Dr. West currently serves as an Advisor on AI at the Federal Trade Commission, is a Research Scholar at the AI Now Institute, and a Visiting Research Scientist at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. She holds Doctoral and Masters Degrees in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, and a Masters in Public Diplomacy from Annenberg and the Dornsife School of International Relations. She is also a graduate of the University of Virginia's Media Studies program.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
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Cryptography as Information Control. Social Studies of Science.
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Social Media as Social Infrastructure. The Social Media Debate: Unpacking the Social, Psychological, and Cultural Effects of Social Media Platforms.
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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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"AI and Labor" -
Oxford University, June 2022
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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