About

Phoebe Sengers is a professor in Information Science and Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University, where she leads the Culturally Embedded Computing group. Her work integrates ethnographic and historical analysis of the social implications of technology with design methods to suggest alternative future possibilities. She focuses on exploring people, places, experiences, and values that are often outside the mainstream attention of technology design, aiming to center these elements in design considerations. Her primary research fields are Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and Science & Technology Studies (STS). Her current research emphasizes the effect of infrastructure in rural communities and how to improve its design. She has conducted a long-term design-ethnographic and historical study of sociotechnological change in the small, traditional settler fishing community of Change Islands, Newfoundland and Labrador. This work analyzes how changing sociotechnical infrastructures influence orientations to time, technology, and labor on the infrastructural edge. She applies lessons from this research to inform contemporary infrastructure design for digital agriculture through an NSF project on the Societal Impact of Farm Networking. Collaborating with Hakim Weatherspoon, Steven Wolf, and the Interaction Research Studio at Northumbria University, her team integrates social-scientific analysis, research through design, and technical development of advanced farm networking to understand and improve societal outcomes. Phoebe Sengers is a member of the field of Computer Science, affiliated with Visual Studies and Art, a member of the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture, and a faculty fellow of the Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Data science
• Engineering ethics
• Business
• Data Mining
• Engineering
• Law
• Epistemology
• Environmental ethics
• Knowledge management
• Public relations
• Physics
• Geography

Selected publications

• Meta-HCI: Practising Reflection in HCI Research

  2026-04-13

  article

  Reflection is recognised as vital for rigorous and responsible (HCI) research, yet it is often treated as secondary, hidden in the margins of papers. This meet-up invites CHI attendees to come together in the META HCI community to explore how we as researchers and practitioners reflect on our own practices – and how we might do so more intentionally. Over 90 minutes, the session will provide a lively, informal forum for sharing experiences, surfacing challenges, and discussing the role of reflection in HCI. By fostering candid conversations about ourselves, our practices, and the structures that shape the field, the meet-up offers an opportunity for collective self-examination and connection across subfields, laying the groundwork for an enduring community of reflective practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Transdisciplinary Collaborations for Advancing Sustainable and Resilient Agricultural Systems

  Global Change Biology · 2025-04-01 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access

  Feeding the growing human population sustainably amidst climate change is one of the most important challenges in the 21st century. Current practices often lead to the overuse of agronomic inputs, such as synthetic fertilizers and water, resulting in environmental contamination and diminishing returns on crop productivity. The complexity of agricultural systems, involving plant-environment interactions and human management, presents significant scientific and technical challenges for developing sustainable practices. Addressing these challenges necessitates transdisciplinary research, involving intense collaboration among fields such as plant science, engineering, computer science, and social sciences. Five case studies are presented here demonstrating successful transdisciplinary approaches toward more sustainable water and fertilizer use. These case studies span multiple scales. By leveraging whole-plant signaling, reporter plants can transform our understanding of plant communication and enable efficient application of water and fertilizers. The use of new fertilizer technologies could increase the availability of phosphorus in the soil. To accelerate advancements in breeding new cultivars, robotic technologies for high-throughput plant screening in different environments at a population scale are discussed. At the ecosystem scale, phosphorus recovery from aquatic systems and methods to minimize phosphorus leaching are described. Finally, as agricultural outputs affect all people, integration of stakeholder perspectives and needs into research is outlined. These case studies highlight how transdisciplinary research and cross-training among biologists, engineers, and social scientists bring diverse expertise to tackling grand challenges in sustainable agriculture, driving discovery and innovation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Transdisciplinary collaborations for advancing sustainable and resilient agricultural systems

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-09-18 · 3 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Feeding the growing human population sustainably amidst climate change is one of the most important challenges in the 21st century. Current practices often lead to the overuse of agronomic inputs, such as synthetic fertilizers and water, resulting in environmental contamination and diminishing returns on crop productivity. The complexity of agricultural systems, involving plant-environment interactions and human management, presents significant scientific and technical challenges for developing sustainable practices. Addressing these challenges necessitates transdisciplinary research, involving intense collaboration among fields such as plant science, engineering, computer science, and social sciences. Here, we present five case studies from two research centers demonstrating successful transdisciplinary approaches toward more sustainable water and fertilizer use. These case studies span multiple scales. Starting from whole-plant signaling, we explore how reporter plants can transform our understanding of plant communication and enable efficient application of water and fertilizers. We then show how new fertilizer technologies could increase the availability of phosphorus in the soil. To accelerate advancements in breeding new cultivars, we discuss robotic technologies for high-throughput plant screening in different environments at a population scale. At the ecosystem scale, we investigate phosphorus recovery from aquatic systems and methods to minimize phosphorus leaching. Finally, as agricultural outputs affect all people, we show how to integrate stakeholder perspectives and needs into the research. With these case studies, we hope to encourage the scientific community to adopt transdisciplinary research and promote cross-training among biologists, engineers, and social scientists to drive discovery and innovation in advancing sustainable agricultural systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Analyzing abstraction in critical agri-food studies and computer science: toward interdisciplinary analysis of digital agriculture innovation

  Agriculture and Human Values · 2024-12-05 · 6 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Seam Work and Simulacra of Societal Impact in Networking Research: A Critical Technical Practice Approach

  2024-05-11 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper explores how conceptions of societal impact are produced and performed during academic computer science research, by leveraging critical technical practice while building a digital agriculture networking platform. Our findings reveal how everyday practices of envisioning and building infrastructure require working across disciplinary and institutional seams, leading us as computer scientists to continuously reconceptualize the intended societal impact. By self-reflectively analyzing how we accrue resources for projects, produce research systems, write about them, and maintain alignments with stakeholders, we demonstrate that this seam work produces shifting simulacra of societal impact around which the system’s success is narrated. HCI researchers frequently suggest that technical systems’ impact could be improved by motivating computer scientists to consider impact in system-building. Our findings show that institutional and disciplinary structures significantly shape how computer scientists can enact societal impact in their work. This work suggests opportunities for structural interventions to shape the impact of computing systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What is History ‘for' in CSCW Research?

  2023-10-13 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  This panel will host a debate about the possible roles of HCI within CSCW research. To do so, it assembles five intellectually diverse researchers who contribute to the field of CSCW, while taking divergent approaches to incorporating an historicist sensibility in their work, as a matter of design, politics, reflection, or research. Panelists will briefly answer the following prompts: What is history for? What does good historical work look like? And, what is distinct for historicism in CSCW? Then, panelists and audience will discuss and compare answers. The goal of the panel is to further hone the discussion and method of historicism, and to invite a wider cross-section of the community of CSCW into the conversation.

  PublisherDOI

• Historicism in/as CSCW Method: Research, Sensibilities, and Design

  2023-10-13 · 4 citations

  article

  This workshop furthers the growing adoption of historicism in HCI and CSCW. Inspired by mounting attention to history in the field, we aim to convene a broad range of scholars to advance the discussion around what a specifically historicist sensibility might look like for this research community, and how such a sensibility may be reflected in issues around research methods, evaluation, and training. In so doing, we will continue to trouble boundaries, disciplinary and otherwise, that demarcate what is considered to be history and whose histories are considered, as part of the broader turn to historicism that is underway. This one-day workshop will be in person and participant driven, with a stronger methodological focus than those that have come before. In addition to working groups focused on topics that emerge through workshop papers and initial discussions, we will develop practical next steps for creating a stronger enabling environment for historical approaches in HCI and CSCW research.

  PublisherDOI

• Interrupting Merit, Subverting Legibility: Navigating Caste In ‘Casteless’ Worlds of Computing

  CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · 2022-04-28 · 27 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Recent work in HCI has shed light on structural issues of inequality in computing. Building on this work, this study analyzes the relatively understudied phenomenon of caste in computing. Contrary to common rhetorics of 'castelessness,' we show how computing worlds in India and Indian diasporic communities continue to be shaped and infected by caste relations. We study how, when and where Dalits (formerly 'untouchables') encounter caste in computing. We show how they artfully navigate these caste inscriptions by interpreting, interrupting and ambiguating caste and by fnding caste communities. Drawing on the life stories of 16 Dalit engineers and anti-caste, queer-feminist and critical race theories, we argue that a dynamic and performative approach to caste, and other forms of inequality in HCI and computing, emphasizes the artfulness and agency of those at the margins as they challenge structural inequality in everyday life. Lastly, we suggest practical ways of addressing caste to build more open and inclusive cultures of global computing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Seamless Visions, Seamful Realities: Anticipating Rural Infrastructural Fragility in Early Design of Digital Agriculture

  CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · 2022 · 27 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology

  Rural infrastructure is known to be more prone to breakdown than urban infrastructure. This paper explores how the fragility of rural infrastructure is reproduced through the process of engineering design. Building on values in design, we examine how eventual use is anticipated by engineering researchers building on emerging infrastructure for digital agriculture (DA). Our approach combines critically reflective technical systems-building with interviews with other practitioners to understand and address moments early in the design process where the eventual effects of DA systems may be being built-in. Our findings contrast researchers’ visions of seamless farming technologies with the seamful realities of their work to produce them. We trace how, when anticipating future use, the seams that researchers themselves experience disappear, other seams are hidden from view by institutional support, and seams end users may face are too distant to be in sight. We develop suggestions for the design of these technologies grounded in a more artful management of seamfulness and seamlessness during the process of design and development.

  PublisherDOI

• Situating Network Infrastructure with People, Practices, and Beyond: A Community Building Workshop

  2022-11-07

  articleOpen access

  Abstract: Our world is now connected and even entangled in unprecedented ways through networked technologies. Yet pockets of unequal connectivity persist, and technical infrastructures for connectivity remain difficult to design and build even for experts. In this workshop we aim to bring together a global community of multi- and inter-disciplinary researchers and implementers working on infrastructure development and connectivity to explore the existing design challenges and opportunities for bringing technical dimensions of networked infrastructures in conversation with human-computer interaction (HCI) and the social science of infrastructure. We will share, assess and define research problems and resources for rethinking networked infrastructures from human-, community-, and society-centered perspectives, understanding them to be embedded with human values and biases. We particularly intend our collaborative work to support real-world connectivity initiatives, which have grown in critical importance over the pandemic years—especially projects in support of Global South communities. Concrete deliverables from the workshop will include: (1) an initial shared bibliography to help formalize the state of knowledge in our area, (2) an agenda of shared goals, challenges, and intentions in our field, (3) a compilation of resources to support future work, and (4) social and organizing infrastructures for continued communication and academic collaboration.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• SGER: Rethinking Drivers for IT: Lessons from a Newfoundland Fishing Village

  NSF · $150k · 2008–2011

• CHS: Medium: Understanding and Improving the Social Impact of High-Bandwidth Farm Networking Infrastructure

  NSF · $1.2M · 2020–2026

• Collaborative Research: Closing the Affective Gap

  NSF · $300k · 2006–2009

• CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Reconstructing the data-driven workplace

  NSF · $184k · 2019–2022

• HCC: Small: Values of Information Technology for Progress: Three Case Studies

  NSF · $497k · 2012–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Vera Khovanskaya

  University of Toronto

  9 shared

• Kirsten Boehner

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  9 shared

• Carl DiSalvo

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  7 shared

• Kristina Höök

  KTH Royal Institute of Technology

  7 shared

• Lucian Leahu

  IT University of Copenhagen

  6 shared

• William Gaver

  6 shared

• Michael Mateas

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  6 shared

• Eli Blevis

  Indiana University

  5 shared

Labs

• Culturally Embedded Computing groupPI

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Member of the SIGCHI Academy
• Fulbright Fellow
• Fellow in the Cornell Society for the Humanities
• Public Voices Fellow