Silvia Lindtner (she/her) is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and Associate Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). Lindtner's research interests include cultures and politics of technology innovation and entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on the gendered and racialized forms of labor necessary to incubate entrepreneurial life and sustain technological promise. Lindtner draws from more than ten years of multi-sited ethnographic research, with a particular focus on China's shifting position in the global political economy of technology production, economic development, and science and technology policy. She is the author of Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Lindtner is a founding member of Precarity Lab, a research collective working on various forms of insecurity, vulnerability, and social and cultural exclusion that digital platforms produce and mediate and the co-founder of the China research collective Hacked Matter, dedicated to critically investigating processes of technology innovation, urban design, and maker-manufacturing cultures.

Lindtner's research has been awarded support from the US National Science Foundation, IMLS, Intel Labs, Google Anita Borg, and the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation. Her work has appeared at ST&HV (Science, Technology, and Human Values), ESTS (Engaging Science, Technology and Society), SocialText, Women’s Studies Quarterly, China Information, ToCHI, ACM SIGCHI (Human-Computer Interaction), ACM CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing), among other venues.

Pronouns

she/her

Areas of interest

science and technology studies, cultural and feminist anthropology, China studies, HCI (human computer interaction), computer supported cooperative work and social computing (CSCW), global communication studies, technology policy, design

Honors & Awards

CUSP (China-US Scholars Program), 2021-22

Education

PhD, Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine
BS/MS of Applied Science, Media Technology and Design, University of Hagenberg, Austria