Steven J. Jackson

Steven J. Jackson is an assistant professor at the School of Information, coordinator of the School's Information Policy specialization, and director of the Technology Policy Culture research lab. His work explores the growing role of IT forms and practices in shaping contemporary systems of knowledge and governance. Specific projects have included the analysis of computer models as emerging technologies of governance within contexts of entrenched environmental conflict (most notably water modeling in the American Southwest, the topic of a current book manuscript); social scientific and historical analysis of the development of information infrastructure for the sciences (aka "cyberinfrastructure" or "e-science"); the shifting worlds of policy and politics around IT standardization and interoperability; and efforts to build robust and equitable information infrastructures capable of supporting both community and international development. This work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the World Bank, among others. In 2009, Jackson was awarded a five-year NSF Career Award for his project titled, "Governing Collaborative Science: Cyberinfrastructure, Scale, and Governance in the Networked Ecological Sciences." Uniting these and other research areas is a concern with and commitment to the dynamics, tensions, and possibilities of open infrastructure.