An Oral History Interview with Karen Levy

Abstract

This oral history interview is sponsored by and a part of NSF 2202484, “Mining a Usable Past: Perspectives, Paradoxes, and Possibilities with Security and Privacy,” at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. The interview is with Karen Levy, Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. She begins by reflecting on her early life in Indiana and her academic trajectory from political science and law to sociology and information science. She recounts the development of her ethnographic research on truckers and digital surveillance. Then she reflects on transitions across disciplines, collaborations with computer scientists and legal scholars, and her efforts to write accessibly for both scholarly and public audiences.