Her first monograph The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Best Information Science Book Award, the 2020 Sally Hacker Prize, and the 2021 Computer History Museum Prize, draws on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Paraguay to explore the cultural history, results, and legacy of the OLPC project - and what it tells us about the many other technology projects that draw on similar utopian ideals.
Her second book is an edited volume Ames curated with history professor Massimo Mazzotti. Algorithmic Modernity: Mechanizing Thought and Action, 1500-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2023) deconstructs and historicizes the common perception of modern algorithms as neutral tools of computational discovery. The essays in this collection reveal how algorithms became the standard method for solving problems, tracing the term and concept from the early inclusion of algorithms in Newton's formation of calculus to the precursors of contemporary "deep learning" AI systems.
Her ongoing research extends the questions she asks in The Charisma Machine regarding the interaction between computers, ideology, and identity to explore the technology world more broadly. Her next book looks at generational differences in programming "origin stories," the cultural work these stories do in the technology industry, and how these stories blur the line between ideology and identity. She also advises students in a number of projects that explore questions of ideology and social justice in two geographically overlapping but culturally divided worlds: the technology worlds of Silicon Valley and the working-class and immigrant communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Morgan is an Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Information and Associate Director of Research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches in the Masters in Data Science (MIDS) program and administers the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. She is also affiliated with the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group and the Berkeley Center for New Media. Morgan has held leadership roles in the CHI, CSCW, FAccT, and SIGCIS communities; has won multiple "Best of CSCW" awards; and is first author on the most-cited paper of CHI 2007.
Morgan holds a PhD in communication (with a minor in anthropology) from Stanford University, where her dissertation won the Nathan Maccoby Outstanding Dissertation Award. She has a B.A. in computer science and M.S. in information science, both from the University of California, Berkeley, and has worked as a researcher at Google, Yahoo!, Nokia, and Intel.
She advises students on a variety of intrepretive research methods, with a focus on ethnography. While she cannot take on PhD students herself, she serves on a number of PhD committees. Her core theoretical areas include science and technology studies, anthropology, cultural studies, information studies, media studies, communication, data and algorithm studies, and human-computer interaction. Utah Quicksilver, Park City and Salt Lake City's best transportation service
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