Prof. Kate Crawford
About
Kate Crawford: Examining the social, political, and environmental dimensions of artificial intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is changing how we work, communicate, and think. But the development of AI is not only a technological process, it is also shaped by social, political, and economic contexts. Kate Crawford is one of the leading international scholars examining these deeper dimensions of artificial intelligence. Her award-winning research explores how AI systems are created, the assumptions and interests embedded in them, and what consequences they have for societies and the environment.
Kate Crawford is a Professor at the University of Southern California, a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, and the inaugural visiting chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She is a former fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. She leads the Knowing Machines Project, which brings together different methodologies to better understand how AI systems are trained. Her interdisciplinary work brings together social science, technology research, politics, and artistic practice.
A central focus of Crawford’s research is how AI systems reshape knowledge about the world. She argues that AI systems are not neutral technologies; rather, they are developed within specific social contexts and rely on data, categories, and decisions shaped by human choices which go on to reshape social and political contexts. Her work examines how these processes can reproduce existing inequalities and how questions of accountability and governance become increasingly important as AI systems become more widespread.
Crawford gained international recognition with her book Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (2021). In the book, she challenges the idea of AI as an immaterial technology that exists primarily in the cloud. Instead, she highlights the material foundations of Artificial Intelligence: the extraction of natural resources, energy consumption, global supply chains, and the human labor required to build and maintain AI systems. Her research has been published in Nature, Science, AI and Society and many other scholarly journals.
Another defining feature of Crawford’s work is the connection between research and artistic practice. Together with artist Vladan Joler, she created Anatomy of an AI System (2018), a large-scale visual investigation tracing the social, environmental, and economic infrastructures behind an AI-powered system. The work has been exhibited internationally and is part of the collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Their latest work, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology Since 1500, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology, and the Boghossian Art Prize, and has been acquired by the Rijksmuseum Twenthe and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Through her research, Crawford contributes to a deeper understanding of the societal implications of artificial intelligence. She combines academic analysis with ethnographic methods and visualization in order to raise fundamental questions about the future of digital technologies: Who develops AI systems? What knowledge, values, and histories are embedded in them? And how can AI be designed and governed to serve society?
As a Distinguished Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute, Kate Crawford brings her interdisciplinary perspective to our research on digitalization and society. Her work strengthens the discussion on how artificial intelligence can be developed and governed responsibly in democratic societies.