ERI Community Power Postdoctoral Scholar
Pronouns: she/her
Email: lucypei@usc.edu

PhD, Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine
BA, Global Studies and Human Computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University

Lucy Pei is a Community Power Postdoctoral Scholar at ERI. Lucy earned her Ph.D. in Informatics at UC Irvine, with a dissertation focused on transnational solidarity and labor organizing among workers made precarious by technology-mediated work. This project was based on a long-term ethnographic accompaniment with migrant gig worker organizers in Latin America. Lucy’s work also has sought to collaborate with communities to develop ways to engage openly with the downsides of technological intervention (i.e. “tech for good”) while still trying to more equitably distribute the benefits of technological innovation.

Lucy’s research is in conversation with fields including informatics and information studies, human computer interaction and design, science and technology studies (STS), labor studies, and global studies.

Publications

  • Pei, Lucy. 2026. “Making a Global Gig Workers’ Movement Meaningful Locally: Friction in Activists’ Everyday Strategies.” New Media & Society 28 (8): 3863–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251352542.
  • Pei, Lucy. 2025. “Scalar Devices of a Global Movement of Gig Worker Activists.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 9 (7): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3757654.
  • Pei, Lucy, Uriel Serrano, and Roderic Crooks. 2024. “‘For Me, Data Is Ammunition’: Metaphors and Community Organizers’ Data Imaginaries.” Companion Publication of the 2024 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (New York, NY, USA), CSCW Companion ’24, November 13, 376–81. https://doi.org/10.1145/3678884.3681878.
  • Olgado, Benedict Salazar, and Lucy Pei. 2022. “Stewarding the Documental Afterlives of Refugee Tech Initiatives.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6 (CSCW2): 459:1-459:23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555560.
  • Pei, Lucy, Benedict Salazar Olgado, and Roderic Crooks. 2022. “Narrativity, Audience, Legitimacy: Data Practices of Community Organizers.” CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts, April 27, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519673.
  • Pei, Lucy, Benedict Salazar Olgado, and Roderic Crooks. 2021. “Market, Testbed, Backroom: The Redacted Internet of Facebook’s Discover.” Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 6, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445754.
  • Olgado, Benedict Salazar, Lucy Pei, and Roderic Crooks. 2020. “Determining the Extractive Casting Mold of Intimate Platforms through Document Theory.” Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 21, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376850.
  • Pei, Lucy, and Roderic Crooks. 2020. “Attenuated Access: Accounting for Startup, Maintenance, and Affective Costs in Resource-Constrained Communities.” Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 21, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376587.
  • Pei, Lucy, and Bonnie Nardi. 2019. “We Did It Right, But It Was Still Wrong: Toward Assets-Based Design.” Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems  – CHI EA ’19, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3310434.