RESEARCH
My research agenda is grounded in a commitment to analyzing the impacts of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), in ways attentive to the broader sociohistorical, political, and cultural contexts in which they are situated. My work investigates how deep-seated beliefs and long-standing debates about language and communication—and related understandings of social difference—shape how we make, use, and conceptualize emerging technologies. Spanning anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), critical AI and data studies, and media and communication studies, my work intervenes in scholarly and mainstream conversations about artificial intelligence and the labor on which it relies.
My dissertation, Crafting Arabic: The Politics and Ethics of Making Language Models in Jordan, examines how workers assert their value and enact change within a transnational AI industry predicated on inequitable divisions of labor and extractive approaches to local knowledge. My research documents how engineers, linguists, designers, data labelers, and other IT workers transform linguistic data and craft new ways of speaking about Arabic and AI, drawing on 15 months of fieldwork in Amman’s IT sector supported by the Fulbright Program and the National Science Foundation. In doing so, I show how they carve out a place for themselves within sites of model-making and strive to align new technologies with their professional aspirations, ethical commitments, and political views. Through ethnographic research across labor contexts, the project investigates model-making as a site where differently situated workers reconceptualize Arabic in ways that reimagine the relations between language, technology, and their labor.
In the past, I have conducted ethnographic research on literary production and circulation in the Arab world; the digitization of funeral, mourning, and memorial practices during the COVID-19 lockdown; and the ways in which Amman residents cultivate a sense of belonging within a rapidly changing city.
