Bio
Lilly Irani is an associate professor of communication and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, the Institute for Practical Ethics and the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the academic advisory board of the AI Now Institute (New York University).
She is the author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Redacted (with Jesse Marx) (Taller California, 2021). Chasing Innovation was awarded the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work, science or technology, including biomedicine.
Lilly’s research examines the cultural politics of high-tech work and the counter-practices they generate, as an ethnographer, a designer and a former technology worker. She is a co-founder of the digital worker advocacy organization Turkopticon. Her work has appeared at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction; in publications such as New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values and South Atlantic Quarterly; and other venues. She sits on the editorial committee of Public Culture and on the editorial advisory boards of New Technology, Work and Employment and Design and Culture. She has a Ph.D. in informatics from the University of California, Irvine.