Christina Dunbar-Hester is a researcher and writer with expertise in the area of democratic control of technologies. She is the author of multiple award-winning books on science, technology, and society, with subjects including wildlife management in the hyperindustrial Los Angeles Harbor; activism to promote community radio in a time of unbridled digital utopianism; and hacking and free/libre software communities seeking to improve “diversity” in their ranks. She regularly addresses audiences large and small on topics from community media to infrastructure and climate governance to feminist technology. She holds a Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University, and she is a faculty member in the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Berggruen Institute, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Her writing has been translated into Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek.
(Pictured on the California coast holding bull kelp, which also maybe looks like an antenna?)
BOOKS
Oil Beach
In this compelling interdisciplinary investigation, award-winning author Christina Dunbar-Hester explores the complex relationships among commerce, empire, environment, and the nonhuman life forms of San Pedro Bay over the last fifty years—a period coinciding with the era of modern environmental regulation in the United States. The LA port complex is not simply a local site, Dunbar-Hester argues, but a node in a network that enables the continued expansion of capitalism, propelling trade as it drives the extraction of natural resources, labor violations, pollution, and other harms. Focusing specifically on cetaceans, bananas, sea birds, and otters whose lives are intertwined with the vitality of the port complex itself, Oil Beach reveals how logistics infrastructure threatens ecologies as it circulates goods and capital—and helps us to consider a future where the accumulation of life and the accumulation of capital are not in violent tension.
Low Power To The People
An examination of how activists combine political advocacy and technical practice in their promotion of the emancipatory potential of local low-power FM radio. The United States ushered in a new era of small-scale broadcasting in 2000 when it began issuing low-power FM (LPFM) licenses for noncommercial radio stations around the country. Over the next decade, several hundred of these newly created low-wattage stations took to the airwaves. In Low Power to the People, Christina Dunbar-Hester describes the practices of an activist organization focused on LPFM during this era. Despite its origins as a pirate broadcasting collective, the group eventually shifted toward building and expanding regulatory access to new, licensed stations. These radio activists consciously cast radio as an alternative to digital utopianism, promoting an understanding of electronic media that emphasizes the local community rather than a global audience of Internet users. Low Power to the People was co-winner of the 2014 McGannon Book Award, for the “most notable book addressing or informing the social justice, policy, and/or ethical dimensions of communication technology, broadly defined.”
Hacking Diversity
Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates the activists engaged in free and open-source software to understand why, despite their efforts, they fail to achieve the diversity that their ideals support. Hacking Diversity reframes questions of diversity advocacy to consider what interventions might appropriately broaden inclusion and participation in the hacking world and beyond. Hacking Diversity was awarded the 2021 ASIS&T 2021 Best Information Science Book Award and was a finalist for the 2022 Rachel Carson Prize (Society for Social Studies of Science).
All my research papers, open access: humanities commons portfolio
CV available upon request.
Email: cd92 followed by AT then cornell then DOT edu.
Designed by Amanda Recupero
Christina Dunbar-Hester 