David Hakken

David Hakken, Professor in Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington, was a distinguished scholar trained in cultural anthropology at Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and the American University in Washington, D.C., during the 1960s and 1970s. His research career centered on the complex co-construction of social change, culture, and technology, particularly automated information and communication technologies. Hakken served as Director of the Social Informatics Program and led the Social Informatics Group in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington. He previously directed the Policy Center at SUNY Institute of Technology. Notable leadership roles included President of the Society for the Anthropology of Work of the American Anthropological Association and being the first recipient of the AAA's Prize in Anticipatory Anthropology. He secured grants from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright Program, universities, and other organizations, and received teaching and scholarship awards.

Hakken conducted anthropological studies of class, culture, and worker education in Sheffield, England; public policy and workplace use of new information technologies in Britain and the United States; software development in Britain, the Nordic countries, the US, and Malaysia; assistive technology in US social services; and techno-science in Chinese and Malaysian scholarship and higher education. His projects examined effective incorporation of social and cross-cultural perspectives into computing design and education, implications of Free/Libre and Open Source Software for organizational dynamics, computing's contribution to economic crises, and cultural constructions of globalism. Key publications include Cyborgs@Cyberspace?: An Ethnographer Looks to the Future (1999), The Knowledge Landscapes of Cyberspace (2003, Routledge), and Beyond Capital: Values, Commons, Computing, and the Search for a Viable Future (2015, Routledge, with Maurizio Teli and Barbara Andrews). He authored four books on computing, co-edited others, and published numerous articles. A principal founding member of CASTAC, Hakken pioneered anthropological studies of computing and advocated for socially robust and enduring computing systems, leaving a lasting impact on digital anthropology, science and technology studies, and participatory design.