Sociologist of data analytics and emerging technologies

Taylor M. Cruz is a sociologist of science, technology, and medicine. She studies the societal dimensions of data analytics and artificial intelligence, with a strong focus on power, inequality, and social justice. Her scholarship on electronic health records and biomedical data appears in venues such as Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science & Medicine, and Big Data & Society, and has received awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She recently guest edited a special collection in Socius on the sociology of artificial intelligence (with Kelly Joyce, Drexel). In collaboration with Sophie Wang, she co-created the critical STS and ethnographic zine AI for Whose Good? Lessons from Community Resistance to Automation at the Port of Los Angeles. Print copies of the zine are in active distribution in community spaces, public libraries, and independent bookstores in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Taylor recently joined Northeastern University as Associate Professor of Sociology and Health Sciences. She was previously Associate Professor at California State University, Fullerton, where she founded the Health, Tech, and Society Lab to study societal issues in science, technology, and medicine affecting marginalized communities. She received her PhD from UC San Francisco and remains a network affiliate with the UCSF Emancipatory Sciences Lab.

Recent scholarship: “A Sociology of Artificial Intelligence: Inequalities, Power, and Data Justice”