Chan receives Fulbright Specialist grant

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies and at the iSchool, is the recipient of a Fulbright Specialist grant, effective January 2020 through January 2023. A program of the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright Specialist Program creates opportunities for U.S. academics and established professionals to engage in two- to six-week, project-based exchanges at host institutions across the globe.

Chan has been invited to visit Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia, for three weeks in May. She will meet with faculty in their new Doctorate in Communication, Languages, and Information program, present a lecture on feminist data methods, and give a workshop about community data. 

"I am excited to be able to use the time to deepen my research on and with feminist data justice networks addressing feminicide and online gender-based harassment in the region," Chan said. "Their research practices and outreach methods to extend the visibility of their data resources have undoubtedly been some of the most impactful cases that scholars have seen emerge in any global context."

At the University of Illinois, Chan's research and teaching interests include globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the “periphery,” science and technology studies global contexts, and hybrid pedagogies in building digital literacies. Her book, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism (MIT Press, 2014), addresses the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru.

As a 2019-2020 Data & Society Faculty Fellow, Chan has been advancing research on civic technoscience and decolonial, feminist data collectives in Latin America that work to reconfigure dominant Western economic and cultural frameworks around big data via the fostering of local sites of intersectional and interdisciplinary data dialogues.

Chan is also a recipient of a 2019-2020 Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellowship from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She was awarded the fellowship in conjunction with the multidisciplinary Innovation Illinois Community Laboratory project, which is part of the University of Illinois Presidential Initiative to Celebrate Arts and Humanities. The project includes the creation of a lab space—the Community Data Clinic—at the NCSA where undergraduates from all disciplines imagine, research, and prototype social innovation projects that will become part of an expanding archive.