Our Staff
Sarah T. Roberts
Faculty Director & Co-Founder
Safiya Noble
Co-Founder
Stacy E. Wood
Director of Research & Programs
Otis Noble III
Assistant Director of Community Engagement
Kristi Mai
Graduate Student Researcher
Suryansu Guha
Ph.D Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Suryansu Guha’s doctoral research focuses primarily on the global dispersion of post-production and localization work. Of particular interest to him are the networks of outsourcing and the conditions of employability of post-production workers. His research involves close observation of post-production workers (such as VFX workers, color graders, sound designers, foley artists, recordists, subtitlers, etc.) and studios for the purposes of documenting their creative contributions, modes of compensation and continued precarity. In addition to presenting at numerous conferences including SCMS, Suryansu’s work has been published in prestigious academic journals such as Television and New Media. He was recently awarded the Wenner Gren Award for Dissertation Fieldwork.
Veronica Uribe Del Aguila
Ph.D Candidate, Communication and Science Studies
University of California, San Diego
Veronica Uribe Del Aguila work deals with the critical aspects of design and its possibilities for fostering political agency. She is interested in the social relations and infrastructures that shape and are shaped by emergent commons produced by technoscience. Her dissertation research examines how engineers produce open hardware as an instance of technological sovereignty in Mexico and the consequences of these constructions for tech manufacturing workers in Mexico. She is a member of the Feminist Labor LAb run by professor Lily Irani. She holds an MA in Design Studies from Parsons the School of Design and a BA in Humanities and Philosophy by PUCP.
Sam Hunter
Ph.D Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Sam’s research is interested in queer media culture, the Internet/digital media, and critiques of political economy. They also teach film and television history, media theory, and media pedagogy. Sam’s dissertation scans the queer Internet from the early 1990s to the present for coincidences of utopian articulations and the accumulation of capital. They aim to show how utopian thinking animated multifarious discourses emerging with the early Internet, including both Capital’s postmodern entrenchment and more radical potentialities. By a Queer Marxist theoretical methodology, their project demonstrates how capitalism successfully utilized desires for a better world to fashion digital networks as machines for accumulation and gestures towards different ways of living. They are also Head Steward for UAW Local 2865, the union for Academic Student Employees and Graduate Student REsearchers at the University of California and Co-Chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Precarious Labor Organization.
Qianxiong Yang
Ph.D Candidate, Performance Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Qianxiong’s research focuses on aesthetics and politics in transnational late capitalism, drawing from fields such as media and performance theory, political theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Their dissertation is concerned with how the Internet and digital technologies produce and rewire subjectivities in neoliberal China while also situating it in a transnational network. They examine how the Internet and digital technologies both facilitate and circumscribe the emergence of a series of case studies of what they call “the underperformance,” which are scenarios marked by an absence of work, productivity, and autonomous agency. Underperformance is an underbelly which exceeds normative conceptions of neoliberal subjectivity specific to China.This is a lens through which to probe the possibilities and limits of democratic participation, political organization, and critical dissent in an ostensibly non-democratic society.
Jonathan Calzada
Ph.D Candidate, Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Jonathan is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. His research investigates how copying and pasting information in the digital world can create a dangerous culture, but also how it opens up opportunities for creative expression. Jonathan holds a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) and a B.A. in Anthropology with a minor in Digital Humanities from UCLA. Jonathan’s professional and academic work incorporate inquiries of power and social justice, especially in the spaces within which he is most familiar as a software designer. Having grown up in Redwood City and around the neighboring Palo Alto area, Jonathan has worked within the information technology sector throughout much of his life. He has held positions as a computer technician, web developer, UX researcher, and product designer. Drawing from his professional experience, Jonathan has focused on the critical study of user interface design and the ways in which designers drive a highly transgreessive production of information technology.
Maggie MacDonald
Ph.D Candidate, Information Studies
University of Toronto
Maggie MacDonald is a PhD Candidate researching pornography platforms. Her dissertation examines the platformization of cultural production through the case of Pornhub. Drawing from porn studies, platform studies, political economy, policy analysis and digital methods, she documents changing dynamics around technology, labour and governance in the porn industry. She is a 2024 Massey Junior Fellow and 2023 Connaught PhD for Public Impact, with doctoral work supported through Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council. She holds a graduate specialization in Sexual Diversity Studies and works with the largest pornography archive in Canada, the Bonham Sexual Representation Collection. She is supported by a strong local union with CUPE 3902 and is a proud member of the Free Speech Coalition working to protect sex workers and defend freedom of sexual expression online!
Former Summer Fellows
2023 Summer Fellows:
Breanna Escamilla, Contia Prince, Jenny Lee, Zizi Li, Krysten Stein, Nashra Mahmood, Magally Miranda
2022 Summer Fellows:
Kathryn Brewster, Kelsey Kim, Sarah Riley, Merriah Croston