My name is danah boyd and I'm a Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. I am also the founder of Data & Society. I am an academic and a scholar and my research examines the intersection between technology and society.
 For over a decade, my research focused on how young people use social media as part of their everyday practices. I wrote It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (2014) to document my findings.
I also co-authored two books - Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (2009) and Participatory Culture in a Networked Era (2015) to highlight different aspects of that work.
More recently, I have turned to focus on understanding how contemporary social inequities relate to technology and society more generally. My current work centers on what makes data legitimate, based on fieldwork I'm doing around the 2020 US census. For numerous years, I collaborated with an amazing network of researchers at Data & Society working on topics like media manipulation, the future of work, fairness and accountability in machine learning, combating bias in data, and the cultural dynamics surrounding artificial intelligence.
 Over the years, I have written many papers on topics related to media manipulation, algorithmic fairness, social media, privacy, teen drama/bullying, digital backchannels, and social visualization design. I also blog and tweet frequently on a wide variety of topics.
In 2008, I completed my PhD at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of
California-Berkeley. My dissertation research was funded as a part of the MacArthur Foundation's Initiative on New Media and Learning. My research was supervised by a most astonishing committee: Mimi Ito, Annalee Saxenian, Cori Hayden, and Jenna Burrell. My beloved PhD advisor - Peter Lyman - lost his battle with brain cancer in July 2007. I miss him dreadfully.
I did my Master's Degree at
the MIT Media Lab's Sociable Media Group with Judith Donath (supervised also by Henry Jenkins and Genevieve Bell). My master's thesis focused on how people
manage their presentation of self in relation to social contextual
information in online environments. As an undergraduate, I studied computer science at Brown University, advised by Andy
van Dam. My undergrad thesis focused on how prioritization of depth cues is dependent on levels of sex hormones in the body and how this affects
engagement with virtual reality. Outside of academia, I have worked at various non-profits and corporations. I was a founding board member of Crisis Text
Line, which uses technology to serve people in the midst of a mental health crisis. I'm a former Trustee of the National Museum of the American
Indian and a former Director of Social Science Research Council. For five years, I worked at V-Day,
an organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide. I helped build an online community to support activists. For a
complete bio, click here.
On the web, I'm known for two things: maintaining an Ani DiFranco lyrics site and blogging
prolifically. Personally, I love music, dancing, hiking, reading, and all things fuzzy. At my core, I'm both an advocate and a scholar. I'm also a parent to three kids.
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