2010 Guest Scholar

SAFIYA NOBLE
Ph.D. Student
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

Safiya U. Noble, Ph.D. Student, IMLS Information in Society Fellow at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a Program Associate at Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana, IL. She is currently a Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) Scholar and her research includes critical perspectives on computing platforms and software in social media space, and the intersection of culture and technology in design and use of applications in online communities.  She is especially interested in the political economy of technology and its impact on development, consumption and sustainability; as well as collaborative design and use for communities. Safiya spent her professional career in multicultural marketing and community engagement and has worked close to 20 years on public-private partnerships between grassroots organizations, universities, companies, and African-American and Latino communities. Her most recent publication is entitled “Toward a Definition of Community Informatics: Learning from Praxis in Higher Education & African-American Community Based Initiatives in Champaign-Urbana, IL,” also presented at the Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN) Conference (2009). Her latest research includes work with the Media & Technology Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, where she focuses on broadband access to underserved communities. She holds a B.A. from California State University, Fresno, in Sociology with a concentration in Ethnic Studies, where she was Associated Students, Inc. president, and chair of the California Statewide Student Association representing over 365,000 CSU-system students on higher education policy and educational equity issues. She did two years of graduate work at San Jose State University in Sociology with an emphasis on critical race theory and gender studies, where she was an American Sociological Association Graduate Honors Fellow. She also holds an M.S. in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois. She regularly blogs on critical perspectives on hip-hop culture and Black feminist notions of popular culture and is the co-founder of The Critical “I” an interdisciplinary collaborative focusing on critical information studies. She can be reached at snoble at illinois.edu or safiyanoble at gmail.com.