Scholarship • Dorothy Howard
Research
Articles
Geiger, R., Howard, D., & Irani, L. (2021). The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW1, Article 175. Open Access version here
Howard, D. & Geiger, S. Ethnography, Genealogy, and Political Economy in the Post-Market Era of Free & Open-Source Software. CSCW '19 Extended Abstracts. Nov 09 - August 13, 2019, Austin, TX, USA.
Howard D. & Irani, L. 2019. Ways of Knowing When Research Subjects Care. 2019. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘19). Awarded Honorable Mention.
Research Groups
Feminist Labor Lab --> Just Transitions
Co-convener with Davide Carpano of The Marxist Autonomist Reading Group: Our research group brings together scholars from Departments across the UC San Diego Division of the Arts & Humanities, to develop critical agendas. Through close readings and group discussion, we seek to draw connections between past and present worker struggles and mobilize for better conditions in response to technology's role in the transformation of the social relations of work and changing regimes of accumulation.
Grants
National Science Foundation (NSF), STS Science, Technology & Society Program, Doctoral Dissertation Research Initiative Grant (DDRIG). "Burnout the Epistemologies of a Modern Condition". April 1, 2020-Ongoing.
UC San Diego Chancellor’s Interdisciplinary Collaboratories, 2019-2020. Ritual Geographies and the Cultural Infrastructures of Creative Labor. Award for research and art-practice group among UC San Diego Communication, Sociology, and Visual Arts/Speculative Design.
2019-2020 Ford Foundation & Sloan Foundation (co-sponsors), Open Source Digital Infrastructure Research Grant. Multi-institution project among the UC Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), UC San Diego, and the University of Connecticut.
UC San Diego Institute of Arts & Humanities (IAH) Creating Conversations, Interdisciplinary Research Grant. Technology & Labor Research Group. 2018-2019 and 2019-2020.
Talks & Panels
Teaching
I taught my first course as Instructor of Record at the University of California, San Diego during Summer Session II, 2022. I previously served as a Teaching Assistant for ten quarters over the course of my PhD training. During that time, I completed multiple workshops on teaching and course design through the Center for Engaged Teaching. I also have ten years of experience giving instructional technology workshops to learners of all ages at cultural institutions, libraries and archives, and other organizations.
Instructor of Record
Department of Communication, UC San Diego:
COMM 164: Behind the Internet: Invisible Geographies of Power and Inequality
Course Description: "The Internet" is an umbrella term for many pervasive and interlocking technologies and forms of human organization that enable billions of people to “get online” everyday (e.g. GPUs, fiber optic cables, regulations, code, IT work, energy facilities, zoning laws, webpages, content, governance, etc.) This course will explore the Internet as a material phenomenon, i.e. something with a material impact on land and resource extraction, as well as people’s relationships to space, to one-another, and to institutions. To do this, we will delve into internet history, to understand multiple processes involved in producing and maintaining the Internet as an ongoing and historical process. We will engage with multiple theories of power to analyze sites of inequality where the impact of the Internet is pervasive: the environment, labor, property, access, and representation. A central conversation throughout this course will be how power dynamics shape the relative visibility or invisibility of internet technologies and the spatialities of hardware, software, and code.
TA Appointments
Department of Communication, UC San Diego:
Production Cultures - Contemporary Labor and Production Practices in the Media Industry: A course exploring the cultures of work and employment in the U.S. media industries, with a focus on the film and television industries.
Communication & Community: A course on how communication practices create infrastructure, with a focus on community-based work and community organizing in financial, health, business, carceral, visual arts, broadcasting, and historical remembrance projects.
Internet Industries: A course focusing on the business models of Internet companies in a U.S. and global context.
Communication, the Person, and Everyday Life: An introduction to processes of interaction and engagement in lived and built environments. Includes historical survey of theories/methods such as actor network theory, conversation analysis, ethnography, ethnomethodology, cultural linguistics, performance, and social cognition.
Audio-Visual Media Production: A course on historical and contemporary media production and how these practices are informed by technical and social constraints. Students worked hands-on with video and production equipment in 3h weekly labs.
Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Communication: An introduction to scholarship on language and literacy, representation and semiotics, mediated technologies, institutional formations, and social interaction, employing examples from a broad range of media (film, digital, performance).
Revelle College Humanities Program:
Humanities 1: An introduction to the humanities with a focus on preparing students for college-level writing. The course covers the Hebrew Bible and epic, historical, dramatic, and philosophical works in their cultural context.
Humanities 2: A analytical writing and humanities course that begins with the rise of the Roman Empire and ends with the spread of Christianity through the Middle Ages. The course focuses on codes of honor, sexuality, and love, and how individuals and communities use the past to construct meaningful identities for themselves.
Humanities 3: An analytical writing and humanities course that explores social, religious, political, and commercial change in the Renaissance, the age of Global Convergence, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. The course examines the development of new forms of cultural expression, emerging conceptions of self-hood, society, nature, and God, through art, literature, and philosophy.