Hi! I am Noopur. I am an interdisciplinary researcher interested in understanding global futures of work, the life and work decisions made by immigrant workers in tech companies, changing values and moral norms and projects of personhood especially in postcolonial settings.
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz – Silicon Valley Extension in the Computational Media department, working with Dr Norman Su. In Fall 2023, I will join the Department of Information Studies at UCLA as an assistant professor
Until July 2022, I was a postdoc researcher at the AI Now Institute at New York University. I received my PhD in Informatics from University of California Irvine (UCI) in September 2020. My dissertation titled ‘Platform Living – theorizing life, work and ethical enactments in the gig economy’ looked at work, consumption and life experiences within gig platforms through ethnographic research in Bengaluru (among other places). It also explored the moral economy of the gig economy. Please click around to read my published and unpublished work on the gig economy, automation and global South.
For potential collaborators and students looking to work with me:
I am broadly interested in research projects that interrogate the impact of emerging technologies in shaping *not only* the economic conditions of paid work but also paid and unpaid care work, and networks of kinship and solidarity that form around, within and outside platforms. I am predominantly interested in tracking how technological participation changes gendered norms, class and caste hierarchies and social life in urban spaces, especially outside of the US and Western Europe.
My training is in Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial History, Cultural Anthropology and Critical Information Studies and I am always eager to think and write with folks interested in affective and corporeal dimensions of digital participation, play and pleasure as well as marginality as a space of life and knowledge-making.
I was a CTSP Fellow at UC Berkeley (2020-21). I was a Technology, Law and Society Fellow (2017-18) at UC Irvine and an alumna of the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University (2016-17). I also run a mentor list for international students looking to apply to PhD programs.
The best way to reach me is to email at noopur [dot] raval [at] gmail [dot] com