Lucy Pei, UCI graduate student in informatics, is the 2024 recipient of the Etel Solingen Award for Outstanding Paper in International Relations. The honor recognizes Pei’s paper, “Globalistic Advocacy: Making a Gig Workers’ Movement on a Global Scale,” for its originality, strong theoretical foundation, well-developed research design and empirical analysis. Below, she explores her work and time as an Anteater.

What made you decide to pursue your current field of study, and specifically at UCI? What interests you most about your work?

I earned my undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University with a double major in global studies and human computer interaction. After my undergraduate I was feeling a bit lost, because I didn’t see a way to reconcile my interests. I began volunteering at a literacy center in Pittsburgh where I was living at the time and began to develop research questions about how different stakeholders attempt to use technology to support minoritized communities. I learned about the interdisciplinary field of informatics from a professor at CMU, and she recommended UCI as a place where I could take critical approach to studying technology.

Being in an interdisciplinary field can be challenging because I will not have read the entire canon of any given field, but it is also a very exciting opportunity to be able to bridge conversations happening in different academic disciplines.

Tell us about your research. What problem will your findings help solve?

My dissertation project is an ethnography of gig worker union organizing, with a focus on migrant workers. My field site has primarily been in Ecuador, but since I seek to understand the way in which the movement is made transnationally and at the global scale, I have conducted a multisited project with additional nodes in Colombia, the U.S., Peru, and online. As digital platforms and algorithmically managed work continue to expand into new sectors, workers’ rights are eroded, and new forms of exploitation make profit (or at least gain venture capital funding) for companies in the tech sector. My research seeks to understand how workers are combatting this new status quo.

More broadly, my research seeks to unpack the promises of tech-for-good and the ethical imaginaries and practices of people making and receiving such promises across various contexts. I have studied tech in labor organizing, humanitarian technology, corporate social responsibility projects in the tech sector, information and communication technology for development, and grassroots uses of apps and social media platforms.

I’ve presented about my research to broader audiences at events tied to awards such as with Zonta International and with ARCS. As a part of my ethnographic project, I have engaged with broader audiences about issues of gig work and migration.

Who have been your faculty mentors while here, and what impact have they had on your graduate career?

All of my committee members have had a huge impact on my graduate career. Sal Zárate and Kim Fortun in anthropology have both provided a wonderful welcoming experience in the classes they’ve taught and in the individual mentorship they’ve given me. I have learned from both the literature they’ve shared and the model they have set in their classes of pedagogical engagement with students. Their feedback has been important to my writing and thinking. In my department, Aaron Trammell, Melissa Mazmanian, and especially my advisor Roderic Crooks have all been great sounding boards and have provided feedback that has guided my research in important ways.

What are your post-Ph.D. plans? How has UCI prepared you well for this role?

I’ll be applying for academic positions. UCI has prepared me for this role through the mentorship and modeling of the faculty on my committee and beyond.

Any unique life experiences that have guided your educational journey? Give us some background.

It’s not very unique but it has guided my educational journey: My mom became a middle school Chinese language teacher while I was in grade school. It was cool to watch her learn about pedagogy and language-learning and learn alongside her.

Any other tidbits you’d like to share?

I got really into sewing during the pandemic. It has been helpful to have a creative outlet while I’m mulling on research stuff!

Where can your work be found if someone wanted to learn more about your research? And what organizations, foundations, etc. have funded your research while you’ve been at UCI? 

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Pei, Lucy. (Under Review). Globalistic Advocacy: Making a Gig Workers’ Movement on a Global Scale. New Media and Society

Benedict Salazar Olgado* and Lucy Pei*. 2022. Stewarding the Documental Afterlives of Refugee Tech Initiatives. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(CSCW). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA 
*Both authors contributed equally to this paper

Christie Abel, Lucy Pei, Ian Larson, Benedict Salazar Olgado, and Benedict J. Turner. 2022. “Tinder Will Know You Are A 6”: Users’ Perceptions of Algorithms onTinder. In Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'22). IEEE.

Philip Garrison* and Lucy Pei*. 2022. Deferring Social Impact: Conceptions of ICTD and Computing Careers. In Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'22). IEEE. 
*Both authors contributed equally to this paper

Lucy Pei*, Benedict Salazar Olgado*, and Roderic Crooks. 2021. Market, Testbed, Backroom: The Redacted Internet of Facebook’s Discover. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA 
*Both authors contributed equally to this paper

Lucy Pei and Roderic Crooks. 2020. Attenuated Access: Accounting for Startup, Maintenance, and Affective Costs in Resource-Constrained Communities. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’20). ACM, New York, NY, USA. 

Benedict Salazar Olgado, Lucy Pei, and Roderic Crooks. 2020. Determining the Casting Mold of Intimate Platforms through Document Theory. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’20). ACM, New York, NY, USA.
Best Paper Honorable Mention, in top 5% of papers

Lucy Pei and Bonnie Nardi. 2019. We Did It Right, But It Was Still Wrong: Toward Assets-Based Design. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA.

Other Publications:

Lucy Pei, Uriel Serrano, and Roderic Crooks. (Under Review) "For Me, Data is Ammunition": Metaphors and Community Organizers' Data Imaginaries. In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '23 Companion), November 9-13, 2024, San José, Costa Rica. ACM, New York, NY, USA

Lucy Pei. (Under Review).  Scalar Devices of Gig Worker Activists’ Global Movement: Nonscalability and the Possibilities of Proliferation.  In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '23 Companion), November 9-13, 2024, San José, Costa Rica. ACM, New York, NY, USA

Pei, Lucy, and Roderic Crooks. "Grassroots Data Activism." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 62, no. 4 (2023): 188-192. https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.a904636

Lucy Pei, Benedict Salazar Olgado, and Roderic Crooks. 2022. Narrativity, Audience, Legitimacy: Data Practices of Community Organizers. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’22 Extended Abstracts), April 29-May 5, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519673

Akwugo Emejulu, Lucy Pei, and Aakash Gautam. 2022. Critical perspectives on ABCD: a conversation with Akwugo Emejulu. interactions 29, 5 (September - October 2022), 34–38. https://doi.org/10.1145/3550063

Lucy Pei, Marisol Wong-Villacres, Sheena Erete, Daniela Rosner, Alex Taylor, and Mikael Wiberg. 2022. Who we are and what we have: designing with minoritized communities. interactions 29, 5 (September - October 2022), 5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3557984

Marisol Wong-Villacres, Sheena Erete, Aakash Gautam, Azra Ismail, Neha Kumar, Lucy Pei, Wendy Roldan, Veronica Ahumada-Newhart, Karla Badillo-Urquiola, J. Maya Hernandez, Anthony Poon, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, and Vivian Genaro Motti. 2022. Elevating strengths and capacities: the different shades of assets-based design in HCI. interactions 29, 5 (September - October 2022), 28–33. https://doi.org/10.1145/3549068

Lucy Pei, Edgard David Rincón Quijano, Angela D. R. Smith, Reem Talhouk, and Frederick van Amstel. 2022. Assets and community engagement: a roundtable with HCI researchers and designers. interactions 29, 5 (September - October 2022), 44–47. https://doi.org/10.1145/3554975

Lucy Pei.  2021. “Information Technology,” in The Annual Register, 2021, Vol 263. Ed. D.S. Lewis. Proquest.

Fellowships, Grants & Awards

Steckler Center for Responsible, Ethical, and Accessible Technology (CREATE) Fellow
September 2023 - June 2024 

Roberta Ellen Lamb Endowed Memorial Fellowship
February 2024

NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, “DDRIG: The Ethical Practices and Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Tech-for-Good”             
April 2023 - September 2024

Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Scholar Award, 2022-2024 Cohort                 
Sept 2022 - June 2024

UCI Initiative for AI, Law, and Society grant for "Exploring the Infopolitics of Algorithmic Knowledge Production, Community Formation, and Techno-Legal Governance" (with Orlando Lara, Farah Qureshi, and Christine Kim)  
Jan 2022 -  June 2022

Steckler Center for Responsible, Ethical, and Accessible Technology (CREATE) Summer Fellow
June 2021- September 2021

NSF Graduate Research Fellow                                          
Oct 2020-Oct 2023

Zonta International Women in Technology Scholarship, District and International Levels
December 2019

Zonta International Women in Technology Scholarship, Chapter Level        
August 2019