Scholar Spotlight: Ian G. Williams

Why did you apply to HASTAC?

When I applied to HASTAC, I was in my second year in the PhD program in Social Welfare at the CUNY Graduate Center, taking an elective alongside required courses in social welfare policy and qualitative research methodologies. In my policy class I was exploring the emergence of an artificial intelligence (AI) regulatory framework in the US, and in my qualitative research class I started to review ethnographies of blockchain communities and organizations, such as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). My third class was the first in a certificate sequence called Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (ITP) – a history and theory class co-taught by two excellent instructors, Dr. Ximena C. Gallardo (aka Dr. X) and Dr. Gina Rae Foster. The course sought to offer some critical, historical context to the question of how education and technology have related over time, and how they operate in the current moment – including the policy preference for technologies as purported solutions to seemingly intractable political problems, and its outsized role in visions of the future of higher education. It was right up my alley.

When I saw the call for applications for the 2022-2024 cohort of HASTAC Scholars, I thought, “why not?”, figuring it could be a good place to work through some ideas that didn’t quite fit in my social welfare coursework. I asked Dr. Foster if she would be willing to mentor me, as I felt a connection in our shared appreciation of continental philosophy. She agreed, then reminded me when the deadline was approaching – even informing me when the deadline was pushed back, and nudging me a long to get it done. So that mix of initial curiosity, a desire for connection, and having a mentor who cared about my growth and development were the right combination to get me to apply.

What has been your favorite course so far as an instructor or student? Why?

The first semester of my PhD, I was also hired as an adjunct lecturer at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College to teach a first-year class for Master’s of Social Work (MSW) students. The class, titled, Social Welfare Policy & Services I, is a survey of social welfare policy and the welfare state – so it’s a lot to cover in a single semester. It was a last-minute vacancy; I agreed two weeks before the semester started. I graduated from the same program it was taught in, which was a small, cohort-based curriculum focused on management, leadership, and organizations. I took two versions of the class over my on and off journey towards my MSW, and finished a policy fellowship for social workers earlier that year, so it was really exciting to come back as an instructor at my alma mater. I was initially quite intimidated; I ran workshops and support groups in my last job, but that was vastly different than teaching a class. So I scrambled at the beginning. This class showed me a lot about my own strengths and weaknesses in how I approach teaching and gave me a sense of just how much work it takes to teach.

It was my favorite because it was my first time teaching, and I was very passionate about the subject. So this was the first real challenge of being the instructor of record in a class, having that kind of responsibility of care and also of being the authority in the room, even as an adjunct, to evaluate students’ work. Students called me “Professor”, and that was… a new feeling. Could I earn that title, maintain my students’ interest, and respond to the challenges of the semester? Could I give them a good class where they actually learned something? Could I give constructive feedback and manage the demands of the job? It was a sink or swim moment. At that time (Fall 2021), all of my other responsibilities – various jobs and my PhD classes – were all online while we were still navigating the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teaching this class in person, on Saturdays, felt like a real spatial and temporal break from experiencing everything mediated through my computer screen and my phone. We were together in the classroom, and I mostly wrote notes, often in diagrammatic webs connecting key concepts, on the white board, pretty much avoiding more linear PowerPoints or overly prepared lectures. I greatly enjoy the affordances (including, during the pandemic, safety) of distributed work, but I also value the presence of learning in person. My students were curious and eager to learn, engaged with the materials in a variety of ways, and really trusted me to move the class along and make the most of our time together. They asked some really tough questions and also, at times, challenged me to think differently about my own assumptions regarding the material, how people learn, and what the purpose of a class like this was. I drew in an ensemble of friends and mentors, including a professor from my undergraduate studies, to come as guest lecturers talking about subjects such as union organizing, the state budget cycle, grassroots referendum organizing, and Federal healthcare policy. I was floored by how willing folks were to come in and talk with my social work students, and how impressed they were by my students’ questions and comments. A few of my students took up my suggestion to attend a weekend intensive “Campaign School for Social Workers” at UCONN Hartford that Spring. I stayed close with my students, taught another class for their cohort the next academic year, and went to their graduate ceremony. It was a really lovely introduction to a new identity in academia, and a glimpse of the emotional satisfaction that can come from teaching, from nurturing, challenging, and encouraging my students.

It also, quite frankly, was pretty exhausting and gave me an early taste of the emotional labor that goes into teaching, and how much work is not factored into the pay rate for adjuncts. It gave me, as well, early mistakes to learn and reflect from as I taught future classes, and took classes that covered actual pedagogical training later on. It takes a lot of skill, training, self-reflection, and practice to become a good instructor.

Speaking on a roundtable focused on social innovation at the Society for Social Work & Social Research (SSWR) 2024 conference. (Photo credit: Jake Gutter)

What do you want to do after you graduate?

I think a lot about this, and often, what kind of life I’d like to lead after I graduate from my doctoral studies. In the middle of coursework and preparing my qualifying examination, it’s hard to think long-term, but the existential question looms. It is such an interesting thing, having choices about this, an an impetus to choose, to take a sense of ownership and direction in one’s life choice and career. We place a lot of emphasis on this now, but in many ways it’s a relatively new phenomenon in society, and one consequence of this is that we have all absorbed a discourse of entrepreneurship into how we talk about our lives.

What I “do” is not just my career and professional identity, but the way I live in this world. It’s the person I am, how I relate to others regardless of what role or title I hold. Yet as a PhD student, studies have really subsumed my life in a way unlike previous career choices. It’s hard for me to not be a PhD student all the time right now. That has advantages and disadvantages; I have incredible institutional access to many spaces simply be being a student, and can plug into so many networks. People are interested in what I think about things. For the most part, people in my life are quite supportive of my PhD journey and I don’t feel social pressures to have some sort of grand plan. Unlike some of my classmates, I also do not have children and the pressures that come with being a parent. I am still in a sort of iterative phase about many of my projects and ideas, figuring out which of them will work and what directions they will take. There is immense pleasure in just being a student, thinking about interesting ideas and forging connections with folks simply by our shared affiliation with academia. But it’s also easy to be all consumed in the endlessly expanding network of ideas and information, and lose perspective on how particular academia is. As well as, what it can look like on the outside.

So I would like to reclaim a kind of quality of life that is hard to maintain in the chronic stress and overwork that is seemingly inescapable to being a doctoral student. I am incredibly fortunate to have a supportive, patient spouse and deep networks of friends and family in New York City. I feel very rooted in a sense of place that I think students who have a transitory experience of their graduate education may not; my wife and I had our wedding at the Strand Bookstore so whenever I get on (or off) the subway at Union Square with some walk time to Graduate Center, I am reminded of this. But in school, I feel like I’m often unable to really engage in all of that sense of living and being in the city as much as I’d like to; my social life suffers in part because of the rhythms of academia, and also that I am generally a more effective writer at night. I fall into routines I have to break, to find times to just go on walks and visit unfamiliar places, get out of the habits of always being online, at my computer, immersed in readings. So often, I’m working at night and on weekends, under multiple deadlines, when many of my friends and family members are on their off time.

Post-graduation, I’d like to have some semblance of a ‘work-life balance’ (which is more of a juggling act anyway) and be able to shut off my mind a bit more, travel without it having to coincide with a conference or a research project, spend more truly ‘off time’ with my wife, and give myself some credit that I’ve done enough simply by making it through the degree. I would really like to celebrate achieving the doctorate as a life accomplishment, a thing that is, in many ways (even in spite of the many problems inherent in it), an extraordinarily privileged life experience in the long view of human history. I would also like to claim ‘off time’ to just take in the wonders of being alive, in the city in which we live. I’d like to have some time and energy for creative outlets that don’t fit into my academic and intellectual projects; for instance, I’ve played bass guitar on and off since high school and haven’t really touched it in the last year and a half. I don’t have time to jam with friends, and that kind of social play has been a huge motivator for me in the past.

I also think about professional aspirations and goals, as in, what next for my career? What about being a doctoral student do I want to continue? A former boss once took a look at my resume at a job interview and told me I’m a dabbler; I try a lot of different directions. Being a graduate student affords some of that. There are certain benefits to the lifestyle, for instance, getting into the rhythms of semesters, the travel, the networks of friends I’ve made through conferences, listservs, and other networks. That part is really fun, being able to show up and be curious, find myself in spaces where people are very thoughtful and passionate, often having the patience to sit through the process of examining some version of “what is this?” Many spaces in life today seem oriented towards application: what something can do, how to do it, how to achieve instrumental goals, how to optimize and align with economic and political incentives, etc. Sometimes, it is extremely rewarding to have no preconceived notions or desired outcome, and just think, just explore an idea. I find that is something joyful in academic spaces, and the various nodes of my very broad networks. I suppose it’s not unlike free form jamming with friends.

So what would I like? An academic job, as a tenure track faculty member, holds some powerful appeal. This is what we are all being trained for in our PhDs, even if there are far fewer of those jobs than degree holders. As troubled as I am about many current trends in academia, I clearly find something redemptive about being in a space that values thinking for its own sake. It would be nice to be a professor with a secure job, and institutional support to teach, do research, and publish. If the right circumstances came together, I’d love to stay in academia, but the tenure track is a long and uncertain road, and competing for such job opportunities requires a tremendous amount of planning, effort, and luck. I am old enough to have faced crushing disappointment in career directions, and I tend to want to have alternatives within reach in case things don’t work out as imagined. So there are also other options… administrative positions, research oriented positions, working in think tanks or other kinds of academic-adjacent entities. Some of the “alt ac” stuff goes in this direction, though at times I find that discourse just glorifies a rather simplistic (and inaccurate) narrative about other kinds of knowledge worker jobs, especially tech jobs, which are in a period of contraction right now. We cannot escape the larger patterns of capitalist labor markets, even if we might find more desirable pockets within them.

One point of deep ambivalence right now is discipline. I am a very multidisciplinary thinker, again going back to dabbling. I have a lot of interests and tend to look at things from multiple angles. I do not like feeling constrained by a rigid definition of disciplinary boundary or tradition. If I were further along in my career, that would be fine. But establishing myself as a theorist, as a scholar, as a practitioner – whatever the choice, there is some degree of paring down and sticking to a path that needs to be made. Or, putting some concerns in the foreground, and others in the background and footnotes. I remain on the fence about whether or not to pursue a job in social work academia or a more interdisciplinary position. There are more social work academic positions, but much of social work is focused on clinical practice, while my specializations are policy, organizations, innovation, and technology. In the long view social work has been a generalist profession, adapting to various problems, needs, and challenges of the moment – but the pull towards clinical service delivery and a focus on mental health specialization is a huge pull within the field right now. I am not certain if that is the path I want to hitch my wagon to, so to speak. So there are real constraints within the larger choices that have been made about social work education, things that led me to want a more interdisciplinary PhD, a fear of feeling alone and isolated within that field. Working with my advisor, who has a background in philosophy and a dual PhD in social work and organizational psychology, I’ve felt incredibly fortunate to have someone as a mentor who similarly, has a kind of “undisciplined” approach to learning and thinking. To figure out their own path. Though he often reminds me, I should make some choices about where I see myself, so I can plan accordingly.

I feel fortunate that I will have options upon graduation, if academia doesn’t seem likely (and to be honest, the prospects are overall, not great even in fields that are hiring more) – I have a background in social work and maintain a professional license, which is an alternative potential source of income. I could parlay my skills into research within a nonprofit or government agency, or quality assurance and compliance in larger service systems, things that are not my greatest passion but I am pretty skilled at that level of detail and system building. I wonder sometimes what that would be like. I have decent professional networks and do feel like I’ve been able to develop broad expertise in my areas of interest, and pick up some practical technical skills, including rudimentary programming, that increase my ability to communicate across fields. I am fairly good at working within organizations and organizational systems – perhaps, at times, to the detriment of my own individual accomplishments and productivity as a scholar – and have a strangely high tolerance for bureaucracy. I do think there is a deep need for more social workers in spaces such as technology policy and regulation. I’d like to contribute more to those kinds of debates, particularly around emerging tech like AI, of helping shape conversations on what sort of a society we want to live in, how we want to relate to an increased proliferation of new technologies, and what sorts of social and economic rights are worth fighting for. There are many avenues to pursuing this and ways to make meaningful contributions.

I will say, as far as long term plans… I have worked many different jobs in my life, many of them low wage, many of them physically quite taxing, many of them rather precarious. My father is a carpenter, and my mother, a potter, so I did not grow up with professional-managerial class parents. We weren’t poor, but I also grew up in a state that had a very expansive child healthcare plan and my parents built a house on land that was cheap and largely undeveloped, relying heavily on community labor and used a fair amount of repurposed materials that often came from renovation jobs that my dad worked on. I had early aspirations of academia when in high school, but I struggled in my undergrad studies to maintain a decent GPA. Graduating into the Great Recession, the job market was pretty rough for someone with a liberal arts degree. After working and moving around a lot, I started grad school, took some time off, went into therapy and was diagnosed meeting mild criteria for adult ADHD, which helped me to understand how I think, work, and operate in the world. It also gave me a language that was helpful in describing some of my inner life and challenges, in a way that fit with our increasingly therapy-oriented culture. When I went back to school to finish my MSW I worked full-time and took classes on nights and weekends. As a social worker I made a somewhat decent income, mostly in relation to my good fortune of having affordable housing opportunities in New York. Social workers are way underpaid for the amount of skill, education, and professional licensure required of the work, but that is also a larger problem of how our economy under-values care work.

Point being… It would be nice to earn a bit more post-PhD, to attain some degree of economic stability beyond contingent fellowships, adjuncting, and other random gigs. It is quite depressing seeing some of my friends and colleagues, brilliant and passionate people, struggle to make ends meet with their education, bouncing from one contingent opportunity to the next. I would like to be able to save more, plan, and prepare for emergencies and long-term financial goals. I do not aspire to great personal wealth, and I do not wish to serve in the interest of enlarging others’ existing fortunes. I want to work towards a world that decreases socioeconomic inequality, strengthens common-pool resources and public goods, builds social institutions and cultural practices that democratize everyday life, pursues peace over war and violence in global conflict, and values policy incentives that work towards broader public good and public interests. Whatever I do post graduation, I hope to remain aligned to these values and goals.

In my happy place – a snowstorm! (January 2024)

What’s something that people would be surprised to know about you?

Possibly, as someone who spends a lot of time in online spaces and studies digital technologies, how much I enjoy nature and time spent in rural areas, and perhaps just how much I love winter. I grew up in rural northern Vermont, where winter was a huge part of life. We even had ‘ski days’ at school, where we could take school-sponsored ski trips to nearby mountains. My dad, who is in his early 70’s, still plays ice hockey with his friends almost every week. I am not that athletic, but similarly, I take great pleasure in experiencing winter outdoors. I am joyful whenever we have a snowfall, such as earlier this week when I took a walk around Prospect Park. We just had the most snowfall in the last two years. A snowstorm makes me feel like a kid again, and it restores something in me. It also helps me disconnect from a perpetually online life, just experiencing physical embodiment.

A diagram I created, starting in 2022, to map out my #phdlife (made with draw.io)

What are some things that you wish you had known before you got into graduate school?

That it’s ok to say no to opportunities when you’re a doctoral student, and set firm boundaries to protect other things in your life. In fact, it’s a skill you have to develop to survive in academia, which is notorious for its culture of overwork and pursuit of status awards and publication credits. I came from three years of working in a public sector job where I had a fair amount of discretion and autonomy within my work, and an environment that had strong boundaries and worker protections from burnout. Part of that, too, was that we had really good management and supervisory oversight, and a clearly defined scope of work. Some of that chafed at me; I wanted to do more than just my job description, and tried to create various projects at its edges. I left to start my PhD in part because the confines of that didn’t suit enough of my interests and aspirations long-term, as exciting and meaningful as the job could be (no two days were the same). When I started the program, I was hungry and eager for new opportunities, especially coming out of the pandemic. I didn’t say no to anything that seemed interesting. I also took a significant paycut, gave up my apartment to move in with my then girlfriend, now wife, and took on four part-time jobs to support myself and transition towards a lower income (and this is coming from someone who was a social worker beforehand, not an investment banker or a software engineer). I was overloaded from the start and have only slowly been winnowing down… for instance, by not teaching this year. But I feel like I grabbed onto a lot without feeling like I could pass things by, and now it feels a bit like I’ve set myself on a path not unlike playing an RPG (a role-playing game) where you do a lot of side quests building up experience and can sometimes lose sight of the main storyline. Perhaps some of that is my personality and neurodivergence. My advisor and I have an ongoing, open-ended conversation about this, which I appreciate.

Another thing I wish I had known was that you don’t have to read everything, and frankly, it’s not possible to. It takes a long time to develop deep expertise in a subject. We live in an era of informational abundance, and overload. I am not a fast reader, so it takes me a while, but I really like to dig into something, I enjoy a close read of a text. But I don’t always have the time, especially when reading and thinking across disciplines that often don’t communicate with each other, and trying to summarize and introduce new information. It can be a lot. I don’t have to fix or fill the knowledge gaps, and reasonable, small contributions to collective knowledge building can be more than enough. Of course, our cultural obsession with speed, efficiency, and productivity has been supercharged in the last year (among some) by the mass diffusion of generative AI – there is even more content to review, and it needs to be read with a new critical eye, and that the promise of outsourcing the labor of thought can somehow bypass our own very human physical and cognitive limitations. There is a lot of AI generated nonsense (not just “hallucinations”, but bad or vapid writing), bloating the internet already bogged down with content designed solely to game search engine optimization algorithms. But that’s another topic, and a particularly thorny one in academia.

As well, I wish I’d been nudged towards writing for publication and dissemination earlier on, with some guardrails and accountability to keep me on it. These processes take time and they’re somewhat mercurial to an outside view. The games of academic capitalism and authorship politics are quite strange. They are also easy to avoid and run away from, because writing can be a very uncomfortable process of trying to make something. Or in organizational settings, writing is often affiliated with an institution more than an individual. I tend to sit on my writing, keep much of it private or limited to very select audiences, and have pretty strong perfectionist tendencies about getting stuff out (not unusual for PhD students, I realize). I also find ways to get involved in the publication process without pushing out my own work first; for instance, I am a co-editor for a forthcoming special issue of a social work journal put out by the Social Work Innovation Network (SWIN). For me, seeing the behind the scenes work helps demystify it and I am proud of the project, but it’s something that again, isn’t putting that time into moving my own writing towards publication with my name as the solo or primary author. I am starting to see how prioritizing my own writing output will be an even bigger challenge as I advance in my education and role in academia, and looking back, see how that probably affected my career up to this point. There are many partially-built projects in my workshop, so to speak.

Finally, it wasn’t unknown to me – I remember the shock I experienced at the differences in life and educational experiences with some of my classmates when I was an undergrad at McGill University – but I wish the vast inequality of resources both between educational institutions, and between students were more transparent in conversations about academia, particularly as a bulwark against the worst excesses of aspirational tropes about access and opportunity. Yes, overall education does lead to better life outcomes, but educational institutions are structured through and between many social hierarchies and structural institutions. Just as other identities and social groups that perpetuate social hierarchies and inequalities, class reproduces itself through academic institutions. It takes time to develop the skills, there are lots of hidden and secret rules of academia, and many of the outputs of ‘productivity’ and ‘success’ are built on unpaid or underpaid labor. It also takes time to plan and to know the various systems, how they work, the long cycles of academic timescales. Conferences are expensive, so is travel and lodging. Many journals that are “open access” charge fees to students to pay for the publication; which students and institutions have access to the resources for that? When students don’t have resources – which may come from private and family wealth – then they have to work especially hard to do the paid work to make ends meet, and the unpaid work to actually produce the things that will advance them. It can be quite exhausting, and expose students to conditions of chronic stress that can undermine the supposed purpose of education as a leveling field.

Photo taken of Prospect Park during the Quebec wildfires (June 2023). Modified by DALL-E 2.

DALL·E 2023-06-08 00.12.58 – “a photorealistic image in sepia of the extended right frame of an old, abandoned park, with a stone monument in the center”

How do you envision HASTAC and higher education in 10 years? Where do you fit in?

I feel pretty optimistic about HASTAC. It’s a wonderful network, and something I’ve found quite inspiring, as well as enjoying the creativity and excitement that arises from other members. Volunteering at the 2023 HASTAC Conference on Critical Making and Social Justice, and presenting in a slot for HASTAC Scholars, really gave me a sense of the diversity of the network, and just how interesting its various nodes are. It exposed me to ideas and discourses that shape my work today, in ways I didn’t anticipate. HASTAC has endured for quite some time, through many changes in academic social networks and organizations. There are generations of scholars who came up through HASTAC, helped make its conferences a reality, and are contributing as mentors and other forms of support. I certainly want to mentor students in the future and stay involved. I am a big believer in voluntary mutual support, and institutional care work. Perhaps in a future iteration of something like Nikki Stephens’ and Molly Morin’s installation “105113200”, my labors too will be a part of the fabric that keeps HASTAC alive. Many hands make light work.

In thinking about HASTAC, also consider its origins in the early days of ‘digital scholarship’, the days before social media (as in Web 2.0… the Internet and earlier intranets were alive with social activity). Viewing HASTAC as an organization, it may be useful to think of how organizations tend to be imprinted with characteristics of the environments in which they were born (this line of thinking is called population ecology theory). So there are characteristics and qualities of HASTAC that pre-date Web 2.0 and its afterlives (be that Web3, or whatever the current iterations of social media communities and participatory online culture are). In some ways online culture is shifting towards smaller webs, moving away from an idea of a giant digital public sphere that occurs on a singular platform. Perhaps that smaller web is more like the digital culture of HASTAC’s origins. Where that will be in 10 years, I really don’t know.

Higher education’s future I am concerned about, and that is a much longer conversation than this short interview can cover. I suppose I have a cliched, Gramscian view of higher ed, in that “pessimism of the will, optimism of the spirit” seems the most honest way to approach the myriad problems faced by the institution. Speaking for “higher education” at large grossly oversimplifies a complex ecosystem of different kinds of educational institutions serving different purposes, sometimes in conflict with each other. It can allude to a sense of community and unity that may not actually exist, and ignore the elite minorities that greatly influence the shape of higher ed. Community colleges focusing on first-generation college access are very different from advanced research institutions. Public colleges that receive the majority of their operating budgets from state and local tax appropriations are considerably different from private universities that may invest their considerable, tax-exempt endowments through private equities – especially when those universities find themselves involved in real estate development projects.

So let’s drill down a bit. In the United States, where I’m based, there are some serious structural and internal problems with higher education, and there are also political and policy problems with how higher education ‘fits’ within American society, and the global economy. We remain one of the wealthiest industrialized nations in the world. So why is higher education not free, or at least, actually affordable for the vast majority of college and graduate students? As a society, we have decided that we prioritize and value, at least on paper, an educated populace. College access is a goal that students in high schools are steered towards, that public schools are evaluated on.

Yet paradoxically, public higher education has been subject to more than three decades of austerity budgeting, forcing tighter and tighter operating budgets and greater dependence on marketing degrees as opportunities that can be financed through a mix of financial aid and student loans. Like many other aspects of American society, gaps in funding shift the burden of the cost onto individuals through debt financing. As a society and in public policy are also still recovering from a kind of market fundamentalism from the 1990’s to the aftermath of the great recession; what is often referred to as neoliberalism, driving countless initiatives to privatize and attack basic social infrastructures, or embed new forms of infrastructure expansion, such as when the Affordable Care Act was passed, with private markets now propped up by government subsidies – effectively disciplined and regulated through the state for political ends. When private actors fail, there is an added layer of buffer from accountability towards the public. And we have so many forms of social welfare and safety delivered through employment here, such as health insurance.

There are some other challenges in higher education, which have to do with the structure of the institutions themselves. Administrative bloat continues to be a serious problem in universities; there are far too many high paid administrators. CUNY’s senior administrators gave themselves a raise in 2022, yet adjuncts can’t earn a iving wage even though they do most of the actual work of teaching in the CUNY system (about 60%). Growth in executive compensation packages (including housing subsidies, university cars, and security details) combined with push towards expanding private fundraising and corporate-industry partnerships and university real estate development and acquisition raise questions about what the primary role of higher education institutions, especially private universities that are classified as tax-exempt non-profit organizations, is in society today. The role of universities in fostering certain kinds of urban politics as well, innovation districts and such, is also quite concerning for the kinds of gentrification and displacement it can entail, and often intensify.

I will say that I feel optimistic by the amount of labor activism and organizing within higher education today, among students and faculty. The recent waves of graduate student unions, strikes in schools such as the University of California, and other waves of action around the country give me a sense of hope. A group of workers are organizing my union for strike readiness, as we’ve been out of contract for over a year and have yet to receive meaningful economic offers from management. Waves of labor awareness and collective action are underway, which I do not have predictions on, but it reminds me that the workers who make academia possible are recognizing that solutions to their problems cannot be resolved individually.

I am also intrigued by what occurs on and around the edges of higher education institutions; how learning and knowledge transfer occur in other kinds of institutions, much of that mediated through technologies, or through community institutions. There are interesting things and possibilities there, which might not look like ‘traditional’ higher end, having its own advantages and disadvantages. So much information and knowledge exists, out in the world, that used to be the purview of academic institutions and professors as curators and creators of expert knowledge. What will that mean for the future?

Within this landscape, I am not sure where I see myself, or where I fit. I am always a bit of an interloper between several worlds. Looking back 10 years ago, my younger self would want to be more involved in organizing, agitating, and mobilizing for the bigger fight – or fostering alternative institutions of learning. But at that point, also, I was trying to establish more stability, and have a bit more sense of control over my time and my life direction. At 39, I want to support and mentor others, to push back and bring ideas into the spaces and circles I’m in that might otherwise be gatekept by the interests of status quo, or the ideologies of professionalism. I am very interested in participating in projects within and outside of higher education that advance the public good (while recognizing that is a contested term). I think it’s important for academics to participate in various public issue debates that will affect the future, from AI regulation to climate change to international human rights concerns.

Presenting at EMES 2023, in Frankfurt Germany, with my mentor, Dr. James M. Mandiberg

How does digital scholarship fit into your research or teaching?

Digital scholarship has multiple, at times contradictory meanings; is it scholarship that occurs in digital and computational forms? Is it scholarship about ‘the digital’, either phenomena that are themselves digital or in relation to digitalization as an ongoing societal process? My work tends to occur more the latter, about making sense of the digital in it social and historical contexts – the fourth industrial revolution or the age of computational capitalism – as a kind of obsessive focus in all of my scholarship in the last several years. We live in an era of ubiquitous computing, where ‘the digital’ seems everywhere (and nowhere) at once, transforming and layering into many aspects of everyday life. Often we only notice it when it fails, or is new. So as a scholar, it’s hard to imagine being anything but ‘digital’ today. We work with computers, manage online presences, gather data from digital sources, use various computational tools and methods on and off of ‘the cloud’, and are all adapting in our own ways to technological diffusions such as the mass deployment of chatGPT in late 2022. Part of this is shaped by policy and institutional pressures to be ‘digital’ – to transform our work and incorporate new computational tools and methods, possibly to seem relevant to a wider populace, or to industries and fields that might provide better employment prospects than academia. Part of that is, too, how often digital and technical innovations seem emblematic of a certain kind of technodeterministic thinking that holds considerable sway among major economic actors of the world today.

For my research, the questions of what it means to live in a ‘digital’ era of ubiquitous computing matter. My desire to pursue my doctoral studies came out of a mid-career policy fellowship I worked on with an organization called The Network for Social Work Management, examining the implications of widespread telehealth adoption by behavioral health providers during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. My mentor for the fellowship, Dr. Ron Manderscheid, encouraged me to start thinking about the implications of artificial intelligence in my field, which I am grateful for now. He saw pretty quickly that I wanted to go deeper than typical policy writing would afford. My questions grew bigger and I started thinking more generally about the role of technology in human services, how social workers think about technology, and what the future holds for all that – including possible risks of automation and technological unemployment within helping professions. Since digging into my coursework and various research projects I’ve come to think more generally about what the stakes and consequences are for various issues and questions around digital society, from a perspective informed, but not constrained by my professional discipline of social work. For instance, does ‘access’ to digital tools have a positive effect in all instances? Are digital transformations of various aspects of knowledge into ‘the digital’ something we want to desire?  What are the hidden costs of digitalization? What are the possible relationships between the digital and terms like ‘innovation’? Who gets left behind, and how can we honor and respect peoples’ and communities desires to not chase the latest tech fads? What are some of the underlying power structures – from surveillance systems, to transnational corporations, to global elite networks, to intensive resource extraction and consumption, to ecological effects – that might be left out of celebratory, uncritical discourses on ‘digital scholarship’? Who gets to define what ‘ethics’ and ‘good’ mean in digital spaces? What is the role of theory and interpretive frameworks in moving towards digital methods?

I have a few projects that address these questions… probably too many right now. The things I’ve showcased at HASTAC Scholar Digital Fridays on AI image generation and digital autoethnographies, another project is an exploratory study of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) from an organizational sociology perspective, another project is on social work students’ conversations on technology use in their internships, and a study I was recently brought into from an anthropologist friend in the Public Interest Technology-University Network on nurses’ perceptions of robotic assistants. In April I’m leading a workshop, inspired by HASTAC 2023, on approaching visual communication with AI imagery with a “critical making” lens for The European Conference on Social Work in Lithuania. Around all this I am working on my qualifying exam for doctoral candidacy, focusing on the question of what “technology” is in social work scholarship, how it relates to a cultural and political climate of a “pro-innovation bias”, and what’s at stake in different articulations of social good or ethical use of technology around social welfare. I aim to finish the exam by the end of the summer.

For teaching, since I have taught mostly in a social work school, I try to emphasize that the digital is not something mystical, something to fear, or something ontologically distinct from the worlds in which social work operates. It did not just drop from the sky. It is also perpetually riddled with bias, errors, and planned obsolescence. I’ve had students who grew up entirely in an era of the Internet, whereas I am old enough to remember life before such things. I also try to teach social workers to think beyond both a sort of native instrumental rationality (that technology is a thing that can be ‘harnessed’) and also to reject the kind of ‘black box’ mentality that often comes with new technologies. Social workers absolutely can and should critically examine and evaluate digital tools and technologies, thinking not just about their ethical ‘use’, but to critically question the epistemological and ontological assumptions that are often baked into technologies used and deployed in managing and classifying various social problems and populations. They should also be able to determine, in their professional judgment, if a given tool or system could be harmful and detrimental to certain situations. They should also feel comfortable mapping out their processes of how they use various assemblages of technologies and workarounds to do their jobs. Getting to that point could be difficult; some of that is owning domain expertise of social workers in digital spaces that can seem quite unfamiliar and jargon-heavy, some of that is reconciling with the ways in which social workers actively construct knowledge about populations and social problems, for instance through diagnosing someone with a mental health condition or determining whether or not someone is eligible for a given benefit. We are already constructing representational systems and worlds about people and their problems, something we were doing well before the invention of computers.

All human social systems are inherently socio-technical, in that they use tools, abstractions, conceptions that involve imagination, transformation, and interaction with material and symbolic worlds. Language itself is a technology, something we forget. Many of the problems faced in society today are intertwined with the various technical and economic systems we operate. When social work first formed as a profession, some of those concerns were child labor in factories, concentrations of urban poverty in relation to larger social and technical configurations. Other concerns were making sense of its own kinds of technologies, like case management or the organizational designs of settlement houses. The digital is no different; it too is social, political, and material. So I try to connect these.

I have also tried to learn, and teach digital skills. In high school I made websites for fun in HMTL and CSS, and I took one class in C, an older programming language. It was intriguing, but also maddening. At the Graduate Center, I’ve dabbled in R, Python, and Javascript, though programming still is not my favorite activity. The Graduate Center has a wonderful Digital Humanities community I try to spend time hanging out with, and I’ve made some great friends among them. In summer 2023, I incorporated workshops on NYC Open Data in a class I taught on homelessness and social policy, having students encourage how 311 complaints can be rendered into maps which represent concentrations of social ‘problems’ which then shape how social issues are managed and urban space governed. More recently, I developed and taught workshops on HTML and CSS for the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate program, and then the Digital Humanities Infrastructure for Teaching (DHRIFT), which we piloted at the Graduate Center Digital Research Institute over the winter break. These are areas that fit less into my broad and philosophical inquiries, but they are interesting and things I’d like to continue to develop. It just takes time, and sticking with a project. In the meantime, I find it extraordinarily useful to be able to understand some code and the underlying logic of computational systems as I think about their societal implications.

What do you hope to accomplish with your research or teaching?

It might help to contextualize my field, and explain a bit more about my educational choices. Social work has two doctoral degrees – a DSW (Doctorate in Social Work) and a PhD. Some PhD’s are in Social Work, some are in Social Welfare. Although for a time the two were relatively indistinguishable, generally speaking, a DSW at this point is an advanced practice degree that is typically completed in three years. It involves some research training and people with DSWs can and often do take academic jobs within social work schools. But it’s more inwardly focused on social work and many degree holders do not pursue academic careers. A PhD has the same rigorous training as its equivalent degrees (in in this instance, social science fields), and tends to be more interdisciplinary in nature. Some schools require dual degrees – for instance, the University of Michigan requires that Social Work PhD students take an equal amount of coursework in another social science field, and their dissertation committees are then jointly composed.

I applied to The Graduate Center because I wanted an interdisciplinary education that would build out from my social work and social welfare experience. I did not want to lean primarily into my professional identity as a social worker, nor its tendency to focus on well-defined, already existing social problems. I also did not want to be compelled towards framing my work primarily in terms of clinical applications. My interest in technology and digital issues is more rooted in philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. I wanted to expand my knowledge base and understanding of these problems in ways not constrained by the preoccupations of a profession (although academia, too, has its own professional norms and assumptions).

All that to say, I am not thinking of knowledge primarily in terms of instrumental goals, and that shapes how I view the very notion of what I want to ‘accomplish’. There are many immediate social issues, which knowledge can be applied in service of trying to address. I support this, and want to engage in efforts to address the many social issues that could be largely mitigated by better social and economic policies (housing, healthcare, education, poverty, etc) but I’m not trying to fix or do a thing directly applicable to that in my research right now. I do not have an engineer’s mentality about primarily viewing knowledge in terms of its applicability. I am also highly skeptical of claims that social problems can be ‘fixed’ through new technologies and innovations, and the discursive tropes that remove political conflict from theories of social change; they need political solutions, and changes to the kind of economic systems we live in.

I am a process oriented thinker, so my goals tend to be less about outcomes than working on improving or understanding something. I am also a deeply reflective, intensely self-critical person. So one personal goal with my education is to develop confidence in my own abilities to complete research projects, which can feel quite nebulous and hard to get a grasp on. Academia can feel very performative at times, especially in an era of social media. People become very skilled at presenting their best selves, building up their work, and enduring quite a lot of setbacks, delays, and unexpected turns to deliver on their projects. We’ve internalized a lot of the ‘hustle culture’ from post-2008 precarity. It’s hard not to feel sucked into that, turn that on myself, feeling like I am not enough, not doing enough. But I am doing a lot – when I come back from a holiday it feels like I’m an air traffic controller to my own life!

I have many unfinished projects and ideas that have accumulated over time; I’d like to complete some of the things I’ve been involved in over the last few years, see them bear fruition as tangible ‘things’ I can refer back to (and get the appropriate credit/merit/credentials for), and step away before moving on to new projects. Feeling confidence in my writing is a huge part of this. I spent a large part of the last year working to develop an understanding of my writing habits, and methodologies, using the software Obsidian to develop a note taking practice to both document the many things I am doing as a doctoral student, and to use writing as a tool for creating spaces and times for reflection on these experiences. As a kind of autoethnography, it was actually quite therapeutic. I presented on this in the HASTAC Scholars Digital Fridays in December. I may yet write something more formal on it, though it’s a little tangential from my other research projects, which are more outwardly focused on various sociotechnical phenomena. But I do think this process has been incredibly helpful for my role as an educator, especially in social work, a field that spends an inordinate amount of time writing, but often in professional practice that writing is compliance oriented, lacking (often to protect clients) a degree of self reflection that good old fashioned journaling can really help cultivate. For students, especially if they have worked in human services for a while, it can take some nudging and examples to get the words flowing about the processes of their work, their thoughts and feelings on it.

Another goal is particular to my primary field. Social work is a wonderful place to have a footing and experience with professional practice. It is very tangible in understanding how to work with people who are on the margins of social structures, trying to help them identify resources that might address their situations in short-term or long-term goals. Practice also teaches a lot about the challenges of policy implementation, self-awarness in the face of extreme stressors, and the amazing things that people experience, good and bad, and live to tell the tale. It is also a field that has committed itself, especially in the United States, to professionalization, aligned with, at times, rather constraining ideas of what constitutes a ‘profession’ and a ‘scientific’ evidence basis for the work. This version of social work largely focuses on individual and family level service delivery, and clinical services. This delivery is often provided through techniques of case management, counseling or psychotherapy, which rely heavily on individual expertise. But social work is often embedded within complex social environments, practicing with edge-cases and unique situations that can’t be reduced to formulas and manualized treatments. There is an art as much as science to the work, and there is a whole system beyond.

There are other consequences of embracing occupational licensure, title protections, and a focus on clinical expertise. These are important for protecting the public, but they have intensified disparities among the workforce and empowered a regime of gatekeepers, and fostered conditions that we currently face of having serious worker shortages. There are questions around expert knowledge and expertise – who owns it, who has the right to dispense it, who has a vested interest in maintaining a claim to expertise – that work in contrast to bigger ideas of working towards a world without the problems that ostensibly now need experts to help manage and mitigate. Interpersonal helping services and care work are important, and necessary. Society needs that. Some scholars and practitioners have argued that the emphasis on professionalization and clinical services distracts social work from its stated commitments to advancing human rights and social justice by way of trying to change social structures, and I tend to agree with that approach. But I also think that part of meaningful action is continuous critical reflection on the world, and that’s one thing that being in a defined area of expertise can help support. So I would like to help advance the small, fragmented community of scholars and practitioners who are committed to these broader causes, and also who want to think otherwise, embrace plurality of epistemologies and philosophical bases of their work, and refuse a kind of pessimistic pragmatism or naive realism about the world and its problems. I suppose my orientation towards Continental philosophy starts to come out here.

Social work has a rich history of activism, community organizing, institution building, and seeking to change the world at large – advocating for people on the margins of society while creating new social institutions and pushing forth progressive legislation that led to significant social reform – from banning child labor to establishing greater safety regulations and industrial oversights. In our era of digital and ubiquitous computing, social work can seem a bit behind the curve on some of the pressing social issues, which are increasingly mediated and constituted through different forms of technology. That leaves us, at times, limited in how we can define and claim out real innovations – instead adapting framework and languages from other fields and perspectives that might have very different ends. Yet we don’t have to stay like that. We can also advance ourselves, be it under the banner of the social work profession or as people who are experienced in the work of social work, to weigh in on and make advances in issues of twenty first century social welfare. In this regard, I am highly inspired by the work of Dr. Laura Nissen, Professor of Social Work at Portland State University and Director of the Social Work Futures Lab.

An image generated in DALL-E 2 from a fragment of Karl Marx’s Capital Volume One

“A mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions of his giant limbs, at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.”
Marx, K. (2004) Chapter 15: Machinery and Modern Industry, Section 1: The Development of Machinery. Capital, Volume One. Penguin.

What are you currently reading, watching, or listening to?

I have a never-ending pile of things I’m reading, and I like print, so that means a stack of books and printed articles I can write notes all over. I have some old bookshelves gifted by the late anthropologist David Graeber, when I, along with some friends, helped him move out of his childhood home in Chelsea. They’ve filled up a lot since I started my PhD.

For class, I’m reading some of Sharon Zukin and Laura Wolf Powers’ writings on the “innovation complex”, maker economies, and academic capitalism, which I quite enjoy. We just read an excellent book on the rise of Uber’s presence in urban governance, Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City, by Katie J. Wells, Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen. It captures a really interesting picture of how Uber established its political playbook in Washington, DC, and also why something like Uber came to seem like a “common-sense” solution to failures in public policy around transportation planning and previous regulatory regimes for taxis, as well as the growing necessity of flexible, supplemental sources of income in the post-2008 gig economy. Recently I picked up Bernard Stiegler’s The Age of Disruption: Technology, Madness, and Computational Capitalism; I am also reading an ongoing list of literature on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), a horizontal organizational form that emerged out of blockchain communities. The other night I went to a book release for The Oracle, a novel about a blockchain ‘smart contract’ gone awry, by Cornell Tech computer science professor Avi Juels. I’m looking forward to digging into this.

Fiction is something I don’t read enough of, though I have been going through a comic book phase and following the rather fascinating Kraokoa saga within the X-Men comics, which speaks to a lot of current contemporary concerns about AI. I read a few other interesting comics on various dark sides of technology, such as Boxed and w0rldtr33. I have also been a fairly consistent reader of various manga series for many years, including Chainsaw Man, Vinland Saga, and Berserk.

Watching-wise, my wife and I have been enjoying The Bear, which I find quite wholesome. I made most of my way through Shameless, an earlier series Jeremy Allen White also starred in, a dramedy about a working class family in the Chicago Southside who endure all sorts of absurd situations. I don’t re-watch a lot of series, but I do greatly enjoy the series BoJack Horseman, which I find has very good replay value. It’s very well written, creatively animated, and it really captures, through the fantastical satire of its humor, something about the qualities of depression that is quite relatable. The last film I saw in a theater was Poor Things, which my wife and I wandered into after a New Year’s day stroll, with no knowledge beforehand nor expectations. It was quite a fun film, reminding me a bit of Werner Herzog’s The Engima of Kaspar Hauser, albeit with some significant differences of how a female protagonist confounds the world around her by asserting her autonomy independent of its morals and supposed rationality.