Anita Say Chan is a Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign at UIUC.
Her research and teaching expertise span globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the “periphery”, and feminist and decolonial approaches to technology. She received her PhD in 2008 from the MIT Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society.
She is the founding director of the Community Data Clinicat UIUC. With colleagues in the Computer Science Department at UIUC, she co-led the Just Infrastructures Initiative. She holds multiple interdisciplinary appointments at UIUC, including faculty affiliations at the Department of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
She is a Faculty Affiliate with the Data & Society Research Institute, a Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute, is a collaborator and co-author of the Feminist Data Manifest-NO project, and was a Fulbright Specialist in Bogota, Colombia working on feminist data collectives in Latin America.
Her first book on the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism was released by MIT Press in 2014. Her research has been awarded support from the Center for the Study of Law & Culture at Columbia University’s School of Law and the National Science Foundation, and she has held postdoctoral fellowships at The CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization & Social Change, and at Stanford University’s Introduction to Humanities Program.
