Anita Say Chan

Anita Say Chan is the Chair of the Department of Information and Library Science, and Professor in Indiana University, Bloomington’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering. 

Her research and teaching expertise span globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the “periphery”, and feminist and decolonial approaches to technology. She received her PhD in 2008 from the MIT Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society. 

She is the founding director of the Community Data Clinic at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where she was Professor in the School of Information Sciences and College of Media. With colleagues in the Computer Science Department at UIUC, she co-led the Just Infrastructures Initiative, and held multiple interdisciplinary appointments including faculty affiliations at the Department of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. 

She is a Faculty Affiliate with the Data & Society Research Institute, a Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute, and was a Fulbright Specialist in Bogota, Colombia.

Her first book on the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism was released by MIT Press in 2014. Her research has been awarded support from the Center for the Study of Law & Culture at Columbia University’s School of Law and the National Science Foundation, and she has held postdoctoral fellowships at The CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization & Social Change, and at Stanford University’s Introduction to Humanities Program. 

Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, her second book, has been covered in over two dozen media outlets since its release in 2025, and was named a finalist in the Computing and Information Sciences Category of the 2026 PROSE Awards. 

• Doctor of Philosophy in History and Anthropology of Science, Technology & Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008
• Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002
• Bachelor of Arts in Women's Studies/Journalism at New York University, 1998