Introduction

Morgan G. Ames is a research fellow at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. Morgan's research explores the role of utopianism in the technology world, and the imaginary of the "technical child" as fertile ground for this utopianism.

Based on eight years of archival and ethnographic research, she is writing a book on One Laptop per Child which explores the motivations behind the project and the cultural politics of a model site in Paraguay. Her next project explores the role that utopianism plays in discourses around childhood, education, and 'development' in two geographically overlapping but culturally divided worlds: developer culture of Silicon Valley and the working-class and immigrant communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Morgan was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing at the University of California, Irvine, working with Paul Dourish. Morgan's Ph.D. is in communication (with a minor in anthropology) from Stanford, where her dissertation won the Nathan Maccoby Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2013. She also has a B.A. in computer science and M.S. in information science, both from the University of California, Berkeley.

Morgan has been invited to present her work at conferences around the world, including South by Southwest (SXSW), the CASBS Annual Summit, and Microsoft's Social Computing Symposium. Morgan has won "Best of CSCW 2017" and "Best of CSCW 2010," was nominated for "Best of CSCW 2013," and co-wrote the most-cited paper of CHI 2007. She has also worked as a researcher at Nokia, Yahoo!, Google, and Intel.