I’m an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, where I run the Anthropology and Technology Lab (ATL).
As a sociotechnical anthropologist, I use in-person and digital ethnographic methods to explore how communities at the margins collaboratively design and engage with information communication technologies (ICTs) for survival, resistance, and social change.
I am specifically interested in the strategies people develop as they rely on social relationships to confront issues of power, resistance, and agency, informed by the fields of anthropology, CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work), ICTD (information and communication technologies and development), and feminist STS (science and technology studies).
News
My article, “Aspiring toward decency: Collectively and creatively appropriating information communication technology in Havana,” was published in New Media & Society in January 2026. (full text pdf)
My article, “Relational Infrastructures of Survival: How Social Dependencies Enable Alternative Internets in Cuba,” was published in the Cuban Studies journal in August, 2025.
Dr. Ben Zhang, co-advised by Dr. Oliver Haimson and me, successfully defended his dissertation, “Infrastructuring Data Values: An Ethnography of AI Production, Labor, and Data Marketplaces in the Chinese Datafied State,” in August, 2025.
Our co-authored article, “The Making of Performative Accuracy in AI Training: Precision Labor and Its Consequences,” led by Ben Zefeng Zhang, along with Tianling Yang, Milagros Miceli, and Oliver Haimson, was published at CHI 2025, in April 2025.
Presented the paper, “Embracing Interdependence to Address Climate Migration,” at the HCI, Mobility Justice, and Migration in the Face of Climate Crisis workshop during CSCW 2024 in November, 2024.
Michaelanne Thomas, PhD 