The Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech program is designed to bring together intellectual pioneers whose work challenges the boundaries of technological development. Through a “whole person” support model of unrestricted awards and supplementary funding, the fellowship provides the resources and space for collaboration and impactful work. Fellows receive two-year awards of $100,000 annually, robust supplementary funding to subsidize additional expenses, and separate seed funding to collaborate with other Just Tech Fellows.

The Just Tech program, including the digital platform and fellowship, is funded by a group of philanthropic foundations committed to cultivating critical work on the intersection of technology and society, including the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Surdna Foundation.

For media inquiries or to reach the Just Tech team contact: just-tech@ssrc.org.

Meet the Just Tech Fellows

2024–2026 Fellows

Todd Whitney, a journalist and technologist, will design air quality monitors using open-source hardware technologies and community input as the foundation for community-oriented environmental data collection.

Miliaku Nwabueze, an organizer and designer, plans to convene Black and Brown activists to improve their digital hygiene and collectively introduce them to alternative tech ecosystems.

Danielle Wood is a professor and director of the Space Enabled Research Group at the MIT Media Lab. She will lead projects that apply satellite Earth Observation technology for environmental management in cooperation with leaders from Africa and Native American Tribes.

Romi Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator. Romi aims to redress how predictive computing has been used to perpetuate racial violence by exploring Black diasporic traditions of encoding, information sharing, and trust building.

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and community performance artist whose project will examine how virtual/extended reality (VR/XR) technologies can address questions about access, community, sensuality, environmental poetics, and the futures of queer/crip play.

Julian Posada is an assistant professor of American studies at Yale University. Julian’s work will investigate the dynamics between human labor and data production in the artificial intelligence industry in Latin America.

Dorothy Santos is a Filipino American storyteller, artist, and scholar. Dorothy’s project aims to raise awareness about how emergency infrastructures operate and the psychological challenges first responders face, in particular with the rise of automation in the emergency dispatcher’s role.

Lauren Lee McCarthy is a Los Angeles-based artist examining social relationships amid surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She will explore the social and environmental impacts of AI and automation through the lens of self-driving vehicles.

Catherine Knight Steele is an associate professor of communication at the University of Maryland—College Park and the director of the Black Communication and Technology Lab (BCaT). Her work will address the expansion of automation, machine learning, and AI in education.

Kriangsak Teerakowitkajorn is an organizer, researcher, founder, and managing director of the Just Economy and Labor Institute (JELI) in Bangkok, Thailand. His work focuses on the challenges digital platform workers in Asia face, particularly those in services and personal care. 

2023-2025

Tawana Petty, an artist, social justice organizer, and author, will create a theatrical performance, popular education tools, and workshops engaging the conflation of surveillance and safety. Her project will leverage poetry and community stories to educate the public to think critically about policing technologies so they can advocate for themselves and create a just future.

Jess Moore Matthews, founder of Backbone Digital Leaders, endeavors to center disabled communities during the election campaign season. By privileging the voices of disabled volunteers and voters, Jess believes that we can identify and expand the digital organizing technologies that make campaigns, elected offices, and our communities more equitable and accessible for all.

Johann Diedrick, an artist and engineer, will examine the origins of racial bias in emerging speech AI. He plans to bring together a consortium of scholars, researchers, artists, and engineers to think holistically about AI bias and implement a new vision for AI-powered speech technologies that allows all voices to be heard.

Jay Cunningham is a computer scientist and AI and machine learning researcher. He will codesign a Black community-led research organization that equips communities with the knowledge, tools, and support to challenge racist assumptions in AI systems and the flawed data sets behind them.

Fernanda Rosa is a participatory design researcher and expert on internet governance and social justice in Latin America. Her work will focus on internet infrastructure and data sovereignty among Indigenous Tseltal and Zapoteco communities in Chiapas and Oaxaca (Mexico).

Adrienne Williams is a labor organizer and researcher with Distributed AI Research Institute. She will develop a calculator to quantify the wage theft inflicted on Amazon delivery drivers based on worker surveillance technology.

Danielle Blunt, a sex worker and cofounder/researcher at Hacking//Hustling, will investigate how criminalization is mediated by surveillance technology and how criminalized communities have adapted to shifting legal landscapes online.

2022-2024

Kim Gallon, founder of COVID Black, an organization that has taken on racial health disparities throughout the pandemic by telling empowering stories about Black life, will create a justice-centered framework for the design and development of health information technology.

Chris Gilliard, a community college professor and widely published critic and advocate for civil rights in tech, will map novel surveillance practices and technologies to create a taxonomy for identifying and assessing their social impact and risk for marginalized communities.

Christine Miranda, a community organizer and digital director with Movimiento Cosecha, a national movement fighting for immigrants’ rights, will research and develop shared resources for decentralized digital organizing strategies.

Clarence Okoh, a civil rights attorney, will analyze the impact of carceral technologies on the civil and human rights of Black students in public school systems with longstanding histories of systemic racial discrimination.

Meme Styles, founder of MEASURE, a social enterprise creating antiracist evaluation tools and providing free data support for Black, Brown, and Indigenous-led organizations, will develop a data-sharing tool to enable strategic collaboration.

Rua Williams, a computer graphics designer and disability justice advocate, will partner with adaptive technology users, developers, and user-experience designers to develop a collective “Cyborg Maintenance” approach to advancing collective self-determination by eliminating barriers to equipment access, maintenance, and customization.