What is your professional background and primary research domain? 

My training is in science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist studies, with an emphasis on digital technology’s social and ethical implications. I received my PhD from the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz (California, USA), and subsequently took a position in the John Martinson Honors College at Purdue University (Indiana, USA). 

I’m interested in the constitutive role that history and unequal power relations play in shaping the design, application, and reception of technological innovations. I’ve written about issues of race, class, and gender inequality in digital advertising and artificial intelligence (AI), the limits of existing privacy law in the U.S. and E.U. for redressing the harms of mass aggregate data collection, and most recently, the increasing integration of digital tools for university governance over student and faculty life. My forthcoming book with John Hopkins University Press, Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (2024), investigates the values, goals, and assumptions embedded in digital technologies marketed for making universities “smarter.” These tools promise to help U.S. public universities use data to hedge against risk and uncertainty in an age of widening inequality, declining student enrolments, and climate catastrophe. Many of these tools, in practice, intensify surveillance over learning and working conditions in the academy in ways that undermine efforts for a more just university system and sideline reforms that don’t lend themselves to technical fixes. 

What is your ongoing project in SHAPE about? 

My AIAS-SHAPE project looks at university digitization efforts in Denmark and Scotland, including the use of digital tools to monitor and automate aspects of student learning and progress to degree; manage facilities and resources; produce new revenue streams; and enhance security and student wellness on campus. These initiatives have extensive implications for digital citizenship, and particularly, the rights of students and faculty to transparent, accountable, and democratically organized institutions. Such initiatives hold tremendous promise for improving student learning and maximizing the efficiency and environmental sustainability of university campuses. However, these tools can also entrench inequality in their efforts to prioritize institutional cost savings, as well as intensify the surveillance and exploitation of student and faculty data. 

What future projects do you have in the pipeline?   

I’m planning to expand the geographic reach of my research on smart universities to other parts of Scandinavia. I’m also currently working on an article on the possibilities and limits of existing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at Nordic universities in partnership with several colleagues at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS). Finally, I’m collaborating with several colleagues at Purdue University on a research project that draws from science and technology studies and feminist studies in order to implement and assess technology ethics curricula for STEM students that centres considerations about justice. 

Recent academic publications by Lindsay Weinberg: 

Lindsay Weinberg, Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (forthcoming with John Hopkins University Press, October 2024), https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12902/smart-university.   

Lindsay Weinberg, “Rethinking Fairness: An Interdisciplinary Survey of Critiques of Hegemonic ML Fairness Approaches,” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 74 (2022): 75-109, https://doi.org/10.1613/jair.1.13196.