Lilly Irani

Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. She earned her Ph.D. in Informatics with a Feminist Emphasis from the University of California, Irvine, an M.S. in Computer Science with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction from Stanford University, and a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Irani's research investigates the cultural politics of high-tech work practices, with a focus on how actors produce “innovation” cultures. Trained as an ethnographer of work, she analyzes interactional, organizational, and cultural dynamics as mediated by technology. She specializes in the cultural politics of high-tech work in the context of South Asian development and global AI economies. Her work draws on and contributes to Science and Technology Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, and South Asia studies. Drawing on ten years of experience as a computer scientist, she develops novel technical and organizational systems for the contexts she studies. She serves as faculty in the Design Lab at UC San Diego.

Irani is the author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019). Key publications include “Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk” (CHI 2013, awarded best paper), “The Cultural Work of Microwork” (New Media & Society, 2015), “Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship” (Science, Technology & Human Values, 2015), “Difference and Dependence Among Digital Workers: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk” (South Atlantic Quarterly, 2015), “Stories We Tell About Labor: Turkopticon and the Problem with ‘Design’” (CHI 2016), and “We Are Dynamo: Overcoming Stalling and Friction in Collective Action for Crowd Workers” (CHI 2015, honorable mention). She co-founded and maintains Turkopticon, a reputation system for Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellowship, Open Society Foundation, and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Professional Email: lirani@ucsd.edu