Department of Communication

This paper analyzes how smart city infrastructures are planned, implemented, and scaled, even when they fail. Understanding how these processes unfold is critical for technology researchers committed to creating equitable public infrastructures. In this paper, we focus on an urban smart mobility solution called FRED, put in place to increase connectivity within downtown San Diego. We analyze it through a decade of public meetings, contract renewals, planning documents, and media coverage. Our findings show that FRED’s intervention was a cover for scaling neoliberal transit privatization in San Diego. This is facilitated by the "charisma" of smart mobility technology – framed as clean and green, app-based, algorithmically optimized, and innovative – to upper-class actors like tech entrepreneurs, property developers, business leaders, and city officials. Reflecting on these insights, we explore alternative strategies that could have produced different outcomes and discuss how our case study informs new design sensibilities in civic contexts.

The opaque relationship between biology and behavior is an intractable problem for psychiatry, and it increasingly challenges longstanding diagnostic categorizations. While various big data sciences have been repeatedly deployed as potential solutions, they have so far complicated more than they have managed to disentangle. Attending to categorical misalignment, this article proposes one reason why this is the case: Datasets have to instantiate clinical categories in order to make biological sense of them, and they do so in different ways. Here, I use mixed methods to examine the role of the reuse of big data in recent genomic research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD). I show how divergent regimes of psychiatric categorization are innately encoded within commonly used datasets from MSSNG and 23andMe, contributing to a rippling disjuncture in the accounts of autism that this body of research has produced. Beyond the specific complications this dynamic introduces for the category of autism, this paper argues for the necessity of critical attention to the role of dataset reuse and recombination across human genomics and beyond.

A growing body of scholarship has raised important concerns about the swelling power of the technology industry in the politics of urban development. Yet in helpfully sounding the alarm, some scholars have risked obscuring the variegated ways that tech sector growth has been politicised and materialised in different places and times. To allow for greater attention to variety and the specificity of places, this article proposes that digital growth machines assemble, and are partly assembled by, cultural genres of growth that arise, stabilise and change in relation to the political and historical configurations of particular places. By tracing the changing politics of tech-led development in Mountain View, a small city in the heart of Silicon Valley that is home to the global headquarters of Google, the article argues that local growth machines have repeatedly shifted growth genres once an established genre had been problematised politically. During these moments of transition, growth coalitions dialogically assemble new genres of growth that they figure as a pragmatic and promising way to help remedy harms of previous growth. While shifting growth genres can help temporarily ease political tensions and allow digital growth machines to carry on, many of the problems stemming from industry expansion continue to worsen, thus setting the stage for future backlashes.

Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers lack accountability and redress when they are managed at scale, and by code. Report compiled by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and academic collaborators, submitted to White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.