Margaret (Maggie) Jack

  • Industry Assistant Professor

Margaret (Maggie) Jack

Maggie researches technology and work in a global context. Maggie primarily uses qualitative methods including ethnography, interviews, design research, participant observation, and archival review. Her scholarly work is in conversation with the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and design. She also contributes to popular conversations about the changing nature of work and the ethical dimensions of emerging technologies. In her teaching, Maggie encourages design and engineering students to use humanistic methods and perspectives to critically analyze and imagine futures for the impacts of technology on society.

Maggie’s first book Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology was published in the Labor and Technology series at the MIT Press in May 2023. The book describes how Cambodian media workers after the Khmer Rouge repaired film and radio infrastructures, and how contemporary new media workers find and repair media artifacts from before the war period and disseminate them (often) using social media.

Maggie holds a PhD in Information Science from Cornell University, an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, and a BA in History and Science from Harvard College. In previous lives, she worked in the international development sector and as a financial analyst in the technology-media-telecom sector in Silicon Valley.