Breaking News!

CCS’s newest affiliated faculty member, Dr. Mary L. Gray, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, is featured in the current issue of Nature in a piece on the future of work!

The piece will run in the print edition in the next issue, but the digital story can be found here.

Dr. Gray was previously affiliated with IU’s Media School but has now joined the Department of Informatics. Dr. Gray will serve on PhD student committees and occasionally teach in our graduate program as her schedule permits.

Mary L. Gray is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She maintains a faculty appointment in the School of Informatics and Computing, and affiliations with Anthropology, Gender Studies and the Media School, at Indiana University. Mary’s research looks at how technology access, material conditions, and everyday uses of media transform people’s lives. She is the author of In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth and co-editor of Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies a Choice Academic Title for 2016. Her most recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, looked at how young people in the rural United States use media to negotiate their sexual and gender identities, local belonging, and connections to broader, imagined queer communities, winning awards from scholarly societies in Anthropology, Media Studies, and Sociology. Mary’s current project, a collaboration with computer scientist Siddharth Suri, combines ethnography, interviews, and survey data with large-scale platform transaction data to examine the impact of automation on the future of work through workers’ experiences of on-demand economies. Another thread of Mary’s work examines how ethics and research compliance processes produce norms of vulnerability and risk in human subjects research, particularly studies at the intersections of computer and social science. She has published research in major anthropology, computer science and media studies journals and sits on the editorial boards of Television and New Media, the International Journal of Communication, and Social Media + Society. Mary also writes for and has been covered by popular press venues, including the Harvard Business Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, and Forbes Magazine. She represented the Section Assembly on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, from 2008 until 2010, and served as the Program Chair for the Association’s 113th Annual Meeting. Mary currently sits on the Executive Board of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R) and, in 2017, joined Stanford University’s “One-Hundred-Year Study on Artificial Intelligence” (AI100) Standing Committee, commissioned to reflect on the future of AI and recommend directions for its policy implications.

CCS Welcomes Dr. Mary L Gray