Silvia Lindtner

Silvia Lindtner (she/her) is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and Associate Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). Lindtner's research interests include cultures and politics of technology innovation, with a particular focus on the feminized and racialized labor necessary to incubate entrepreneurial life and to sustain technological promises of data-driven futures, individual empowerment, and democratized agency. Lindtner draws from more than ten years of multi-sited ethnographic research, examining China's shifting position in the global political economy of technology production, economic development, and science and technology policy. She is the author of Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020). The book reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation.

Lindtner is a founding member of Precarity Lab, a research collective working on various forms of insecurity, vulnerability, and social and cultural exclusion that digital platforms produce and mediate and the co-founder of the China research collective Hacked Matter, dedicated to critically investigating processes of technology innovation, urban design, and maker-manufacturing cultures. Her research has been awarded support from the US National Science Foundation, IMLS, Intel Labs, Google Anita Borg, and the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation. Her work has appeared at ST&HV (Science, Technology, and Human Values), ESTS (Engaging Science, Technology and Society), SocialText, Women’s Studies Quarterly, China Information, ToCHI, ACM SIGCHI (Human-Computer Interaction), ACM CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing), among other venues.