MARÍA P. ÁNGEL

Privacy, Law & Technology, STS

STS Portfolio

Here I have collected some of my work and thinking on Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS).  Jump to portfolio contents.

A brief account of my intellectual journey with STS

I started my Ph.D. in September 2019. Over the past four years, my dissertation project has undergone a great deal of change. Throughout this journey, STS has always played a major role.

When I started my Ph.D., I was planning to study the privacy risks of the use of machine learning in public decision-making. My first book, The Datafied Public Administration. Governing Through Big Data, was in the process of being published, and I thought that examining the implications of a datafied public administration for privacy was a logical next step.

For these reasons, in my initial application to the graduate certificate in STS I stated that I was seeking interdisciplinary training that would enable me to better understand “the relationship between artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data exploitation, on the one hand, and public administration and data subjects, on the other.”

In fact, most of my first STS courses contributed to that goal. The final project that I advanced for the Science, Technology & Society Studies in Action course, for example, provided me with an opportunity to explore the historical reasons why Big Data and algorithms, as technical artefacts, have become such a preferred method of decision-making in government. Similarly, the final essay for the Theories of Technology and Society course allowed me to compare and contrast the impact of algorithms as seen by scholars in law, social science, and STS.

However, this last essay, along with the literature review I was conducting at the time for my own Ph.D. research design, drew my attention to a different dynamic: scholars in the legal field consistently framed the implications of algorithms and data-driven decision-making in terms of privacy. Why were they doing that? When did this dynamic start? How did algorithms–as a rhetorical concept–influence scholars’ views on privacy? This puzzle, which I unexpectedly encountered, became the focus of my doctoral research. I decided to trace the evolution of the concept of information privacy in American privacy law scholarship over the past thirty years, during which information technology advanced from personal computers and networks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and algorithmic decision-making systems. 

From that point on, the role of STS in my doctoral research entered into a second phase. I wanted to understand now the dialectical, bidirectional relationship between technological innovations and legal scholars’ ideas about privacy. I wanted to invite the legal and the cognitive to a “party” exclusively dominated by the social and the technological. And STS, once again, provided me with a variety of disciplinary research methodologies and theoretical frameworks to strengthen my research.

Initially, I considered using Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as my research method, to trace the evolving relationship between information technologies and scholars. However, after taking a deeper dive into this research method in the Qualitative Research Methods course and learning more about the kinds of research questions it was best suited to, I abandoned that idea. ANT traces associations (“networks”) between human and non-human agents, seeking to make visible the resulting joint production of actors and artifacts. However, I realized that in my research project, the role of non-human agents (algorithms) was not as crucial to the development of scholars’ concepts of privacy as I had initially assumed.  It was therefore not my priority to trace the algorithms’ associations with scholars. More important was to trace the evolution of scholars’ own ideas (about technologies) and evolving imaginaries (about desirable futures), which ended up leading me to explore other research methods in Intellectual History.

Ultimately, two STS themes emerged as the driving forces of my doctoral research’s theoretical framework: sociotechnical imaginaries and the Legal Construction of Technology.

Sociotechnical imaginaries

Thanks to the Theoretical Foundations of Information Science course, I was exposed to Sheila Jasanoff & Sang-Hyun Kim’s concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries” (2009; 2015). I was fascinated by its theoretical antecedents and practical uses, and initially thought that, by studying the scholars’ imaginaries, I would be able to have a better understanding of the evolution of the concept of information privacy in legal scholarship.

Later on, and due to valuable feedback from my STS advisor Megan Finn, I came to realize that this concept was too broad and ambitious for my object of study, since legal scholarship does not necessarily reflect dominant social imaginaries. Consequently, inspired by my STS advisor once again, I developed my own (and narrower) theoretical concept of “techno-legal imaginaries,” which would draw upon both the concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries,” as well as other theoretical constructs, such as the concept of “technoscientific imaginaries” developed by George Marcus (1995). Through the passage of time, the concept has evolved under the influence of additional theoretical developments, such as those proposed by authors in the “sociology of expectations” (Van Lente & Rip, 1998; Brown & Michael, 2003; Borup et al., 2006; Konrad at al. Konrad, 2019), to which I have been exposed as a result of the 6th STS Italia Summer School.

Legal Construction of Technology

Thanks to my doctoral committee member Meg Leta Jones, who comes from both the legal and STS fields, I came across the term “Legal Construction of Technology” or “techno-legal construction.” According to Jones, who created the term,

“The legal construction of technology focuses on law as a cultural corner of societies with its own customs and rituals, players and roles, institutions and relationships, and rules and power—and how this cultural corner makes sense of a technology, technological system, or technological concept” (2018, p. 281).

Jones proposed this term in response to technological essentialist approaches to law and technological change. It looks to problematize the supposed causal relationship between technology and legal change, by highlighting the multiple ways in which technologies, practices, and social arrangements are constructed within certain legal contexts (which are also cultural and social). In this way, it is in an attempt to link the field of Law & Technology with STS, and particularly, with the perspective often referred to as the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT).

This approach, which has also been proposed and complemented by other law scholars (Balkin, 2015; Kaminski, 2017), quickly caught my attention. I thought that I could use my proposed term of “techno-legal imaginaries” to build upon this proposed link between the field of Law & Technology and SCOT, and extend it to the co-production perspective also nested in STS. In this way, by exploring the “Legal Co-Production of Technology,” I could contribute to larger ideas in STS about the production of socio-techo-legal relations.

Besides driving these important turns in my journey, the STS courses I took during these years also introduced me to many other relevant concepts that have enriched my theoretical toolkit. In Science, Technology & Society Studies in Action I was introduced to concepts such as classifications, standards, and categories; information infrastructures; paradigms; frames; rhetoric and means of persuasion; objectivity; and domains. The Data Then & Now Research Seminar broadened my own concept of data. Theories of Technology and Society was a game-changer course for me. It exposed me for the first time to concepts such as technology, users, protocol, networks, power, identity, agency, and materiality, and to some of the theories that have been developed around them. After almost three years, I keep going back to my notes from this course for references and context. Finally, the Theoretical Foundations of Information Science course was also a turning point in my journey. Besides introducing me to the concepts of imaginaries, promises, cultural mythologies, and ideal futures—which turned out to be essential in my dissertation—, it allowed me to discover academic conversations about racializing surveillance, decolonizing the technological, Black cyberculture, techno-philanthropism, techno-idealism/utopianism, technological promise, and entrepreneurial citizenship.

As can be seen, STS has enhanced the theoretical contribution of my Ph.D. research project. It has provided me with the opportunity to think outside the box, by exposing me to relevant literature and an interdisciplinary community of professors and graduate students. It has led me to consider my subject of study as a sociotechnical phenomenon, in which the cognitive, technological, social, and legal dimensions, all play a part.

References

STS Coursework

Attended Talks

STS Extracurriculars

STS in my Dissertation

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