The Trustworthy Infrastructures team researches community-driven responses to technology’s entrance into the most intimate parts of our working, material, personal, and public lives. We are interested in the sociopolitical conditions created by technological expansion, and how communities reassert their own power, agency, and knowledge in response. 

Research shows the physical infrastructure of digital technologies is increasingly taxing the labor, resources, and land of marginalized communities by way of data center expansion, climate-heavy extraction, and other material impacts. Digital infrastructures also regularly encroach upon civic space, imposing top-down models of how people should live, work, and relate to each other, and flattening communities into data that often fails to reflect the complexity of who we are. We seek to gain a clearer picture of the robust social infrastructure people have built to engage with, build upon, resist, and protect themselves from these technological forces — in both the digital and physical world. 

We believe it’s critical to approach this work from the perspective of marginalized people who are disproportionately harmed by the status quo. Centering the work, experience, and knowledge of people of color and members of impacted communities, we produce empirical research to shape the development of trustworthy infrastructures and the policies and regulations that govern them.