Alex Jiahong Lu
鲁 家宏

[About]
Publications
CV

Currently, I’m an assistant professor of library and information science at rutgers university school of communication and information. I hold a phd in information science and a master of social work from the university of michigan.

✏ Email: ajh.lu[at]rutgers[dot]edu

I am a sociotechnical scholar. My work is grounded in critical hci (human-computer interaction) and cscw (computer-supported cooperative work), participatory design (pd), and sts (science and technology studies). I adopt arts-based and community-based participatory research approaches and ethnography in my work.

[01]
Critical
Inquiry

Labor and Implications of Sociotechnical Infrastructures
My work looks into the labor and social/cultural/material implications of critical infrastructures in varied domains in both the U.S. and China, particularly large-scale data-driven infrastructures of governance and care in urban spaces. Through ethnographic and participatory research approaches, I am interested in how these infrastructures come into being, how institutional and social actors make sense and negotiate with them, and how they mediate and inform particular forms of socialities and ways of knowing (while foreclosing others).

[02]
Design-based
Inquiry

Decentering through Community-Based Participatory Research and Design
I am committed to centering communities in knowledge coproduction and dissemination. My work both employs and develops community-based participatory research methodologies for studying critical infrastructures and emerging technologies in collaboration with community partners and members (such as photovoice, videovoice, and intergenerational participatory speculative design through children’s books). Through these approaches, I seek to build research practices that center community members’ expertise and lived knowledge in the imagination, design, and governance of technologies and policies.

[03]
Critical
Inquiry

Infrastructuring Alternative Onto-Epistemologies
My recent work asks how we might notice and foster the agency of impacted people and communities by rethinking our analytical approaches to the temporality, spatiality, and relationality of critical infrastructures. By questioning the sociotechnical production of the marginality of alternative knowledges (such as traditional Chinese medicine, Chinese fortune-telling, and Black placemaking and more-than-human knowledge), as well as how they, in turn, rehearse and enact alternative forms of practical ontologies, this ongoing work asks how we might rethink our approaches to technologies and how we might imagine and articulate alternatives across differences.