Megan Finn Associate Professor Communication Studies
- Degrees
- BS, Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2000
MIMS, Information Management and Systems, University of California, Berkeley, 2005
PhD, Information Science, University of California, Berkeley 2012 - Favorite Spot on Campus
- The Dav!
- Bio
-
Hello! You can learn more about my work and find links to my publications at meganfinn.com. I am accepting MA and PhD advisees.
I have a number of research projects which are historical and contemporary empirical studies of responsible computing and data governance. My work examines relations among policies, infrastructures, and practices in the production, circulation, and use of data and information. I examine these themes in a book, called Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters, with MIT Press (October 2018). The book is an examination of how changing public information infrastructures shaped people’s experience of earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989 followed by an analysis of the institutions, policies, and technologies that shape today’s postdisaster information landscape. I argue that information orders—complex constellations of institutions, technologies, and practices—influence how we act in, experience, and document events. What I term event epistemologies, constituted both by historical documents and by researchers who study them, explain how information orders facilitate particular possibilities for knowledge.
Before moving to SOC at AU, I was a professor at University of Washington’s Information School. I was a faculty member of the DataLab at the iSchool, and an affiliate of the UW’s eScience Institute, where, as a part of the Data Science Studies group, I co-convened a talk series, “Data Then and Now” from 2019-2021. I was an advisor with my university’s Science, Technology and Society Studies (STSS) program where I have been lucky enough to advise incredible students from Forestry, Law, and Urban Planning. I was lucky enough to supervise Meg Young, now a researcher at Data and Society. I am still an affiliate professor with the University of Washington.
In 2022-2023 I was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society and Stanford’s Department of Communication and HAI. In 2021-2022 I was a Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. From 2012-2014 I spent two wonderful years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, MA with the Social Media Research Group.
I completed my PhD in 2012 at UC Berkeley’s School of Information where Paul Duguid and AnnaLee Saxenian were my PhD advisors.I have a Masters degree in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley, and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor LSA Honors College.
- See Also
- For the Media
- To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.
Teaching
Fall 2024
-
COMM-704 Media, Technology & Democracy
-
COMM-899 Doctoral Dissertation
Spring 2025
-
COMM-861 Adv Research & Project Develop
-
CORE-105 Complex Problems Seminar: AI in the Workplace