Gina Neff
Gina Neff is associate professor of communication at the University of Washington and the School for Public Policy at Central European University in Budapest. She studies how people work with data in teams and groups, thereby exploring the impact of new information and communication technologies on workers, workplaces, and industries. She wrote Venture Labor and with Dawn Nafus has written the forthcoming Quantified Self. She advises Data & Society, a policy organization headed by danah boyd, and lectures on data’s social and political impacts. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Intel, and Microsoft Research.
Biography
Dr. Gina Neff is an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington. She studies the contemporary economics of media production and the political economy of communication by examining the relationship between work and technology in high-tech and media industries. Her book Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries (MIT 2012) examines the risk and uncertainties borne by New York City’s new media pioneers during the first internet boom. She also co-edited Surviving the New Economy (Paradigm 2007). With Carrie Sturts Dossick, she runs the Project on Communication Technology and Organizational Practices, a research group studying the roles of communication technology in the innovation of complex building design and construction. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, and she is currently at work on a three-year project funded by Intel studying the impact of social media and consumer health technologies on the organization of primary care.
She has a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University, where she remains an external faculty affiliate of the Center on Organizational Innovation. For 2012-13 she was a fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy and a visiting scholar at NYU’s Media, Culture and Communication Department. She has held appointments at UC San Diego, UCLA, and Stanford University. In addition to academic outlets, her research and writing have been featured in The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Fortune, The American Prospect, and The Nation.