Silvia M. Lindtner

Silvia M. Lindtner is associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and the Associate Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). Lindtner's research interests include cultures and politics of technology innovation and entrepreneurship as well as shifts in tech labor, industry, policy, and governance. Lindtner draws from more than ten years of multi-sited ethnographic research, with a particular focus on China's shifting role in global tech production, unpacking how enduring colonialism and racism shape the global political economy of technology production and science and technology policy. Her first book "Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation” (Princeton University Press, 2020) offers a transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image, revealing how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation. Lindtner’s work contributes to the fields of science and technology studies, science and technology policy, China studies, digital studies, HCI (human computer interaction), cultural and feminist anthropology, and global communication studies. Her research has been awarded support from the US National Science Foundation, IMLS, Intel Labs, Google Anita Borg, and the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation.