Hi! I’m Xiaowei R. Wang, a researcher, artist and sometimes coder working in transpacific geographies. I also am a steward of Collective Action School, a community driven organizing school for tech workers.
My work centers the question: how do digital technologies re/shape our physical ecologies and our definitions of nature? I do the work that I do out of endless curiosity and wonder for the world we live in, and the belief that all beings on this planet deserve an environment that cultivates and nourishes life. My work is deeply personal. I believe that, as Jeffrey Yoo Warren says, diaspora is a place of knowledge making. My interest in environment, work, labor and tech is an attempt to steward the experiences people in my lineage, of my grandmother and mother: women who were factory workers, textile workers who also have very complex relationships to work and labor against the looming context of planetary health.
To get in touch: xiaowei.wang ‘at’ northwestern.edu
Institutional bio 🎩🎩🎩:
Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, scholar, organizer and coder based across the Pacific. Currently, they are a Mancosh Pathways to the Professoriate Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University's School of Communication.
Their multidisciplinary work over the past 15+ years sits at the intersection of public art, tech, advocacy, social and environmental justice. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China's Countryside which examines the social and environmental impacts of technology on agriculture and rural communities. The book is a selection for the 2023 National Book Foundation Science and Literature Award, and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Recent policy writing includes Bodily Harms: Mapping the Risks of the Emerging Biometric Tech, co-authored with Shazeda Ahmed and published by Access Now, which examines how AI-driven biometric systems classify, categorize, and control bodies in ways that curtail human rights. In 2024 they received an Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellowship to support their work on soft, embroidered textile hard drives for An Archive of Witch Fever.
Through their work as a steward of Collective Action School (formerly Logic School) and as an advisor at Processing Foundation, they channel their love of building learning communities around imagining more joyful, relational technologies.
In previous lives they were: Faculty at ELISAVA School of Design and Engineering for the Master in Design for Responsible AI, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the UCLA Center on Race and Digital Justice / UCLA Gender Studies, recognized for their work in tech and justice as a Luminary for Omidyar’s The Tech We Want program, spent 7 years as the Creative Director at Logic Magazine, a platform engineer at Mapbox, a designer & engineer at Meedan, a global tech non-profit building open source fact-checking & NLP tools for journalists and activists.
Xiaowei holds a PhD in Geography w/designated emphasis in New Media from the University of California, Berkeley, a MA from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a BA from Harvard University. During their PhD they were awarded a fellowship in 2016 for University of San Francisco’s Deep Learning Certificate, and a National Science Foundation Fellowship for the Environment and Society: Data Sciences for the 21st Century program.