This is Vera Khovanskaya's website. I'm in my fourth year of being a graduate student worker the Information Science PhD program at Cornell University.
I am a graduate student in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University. I study how social implications are built into technology through technical decision-making, and develop methods to identify and alter underlying values in technology through critical technical practice. I am also interested in methods that integrate archival research with early stages of design research and speculative design. My current focus for this work is studying the design and implementation of new metrics for evaluating the outputs of work in relationship to organized labor, specifically in the context of workplace rationalization projects taken up by the engineering department of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the 1940-50s.
This summer I am co-organizing a summer school on technology and social impact. I regularly TA INFO/STS 4240: Designing Technologies for Social Impact and in the summer of 2017 I taught INFO1100, an introductory programming course for non-majors in Processing.
I am advised by Phoebe Sengers. My brilliant committee also features Karen EC Levy, Adam Seth Litwin, and Lynn Dombrowski. I am a member of the Culturally Embedded Computing Group, CEmCom.
When I was deciding how to design this, I searched for "good websites without a .css file" in the Google search engine and when they couldn't find anything I decided to do it first.
Everything else after here is incredibly out of date, I am working on making it better but I also also working on my dissertation. Here is my CV (last updated March 2016).