Kate Crawford
Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of the social and political implications of AI. She is research professor at USC Annenberg, senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney, and co-founder of the AI Now Institute at NYU. Her work combines ethnography, archival research, media theory, and political economy into an integrated analysis of AI as a material and institutional phenomenon.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Crawford's distinctive contribution is methodological: she insists on tracing AI systems to their material substrates rather than analyzing them as abstract computational objects. Her fieldwork has included visits to lithium mines in Nevada, cobalt extraction sites in the Democratic Republic of Congo, rare earth processing facilities in Inner Mongolia, Amazon fulfillment warehouses, and content moderation centers in the Philippines. The Atlas of AI (2021) synthesizes this research into the field's most comprehensive map of AI's physical reality.
Her earlier project Anatomy of an AI System (2018, with Vladan Joler) — a large-scale diagram tracing