Profile

Professor Gina Neff is Professor of Technology & Society at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. She studies the future of work in data-rich environments. Professor Neff leads a new multinational comparative research project on the effects of the adoption of AI across multiple industries. She is the author of Venture Labor (MIT Press, 2012), which won the 2013 American Sociological Association Communication and Information Technologies Best Book Award; and with Dawn Nafus Self-Tracking (MIT Press, 2016). Her writing for the general public has appeared in Wired, Slate and The Atlantic, among other outlets. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University, where she remains a faculty affiliate at the Center on Organizational Innovation, and she serves as a strategic advisor on the social impact of AI for the Women’s Forum.

Areas of Interest for Doctoral Supervision

Professor Neff is not taking on new doctoral students at this time.

Research interests

Innovation, work, organisations, culture, communication, theory, qualitative methods, critical data studies, science and technology studies.

Position held at the OII

  • Professor of Technology & Society, October 2020 –
  • Director of DPhil programme, January 2017 – September 2019
  • Senior Research Fellow, July 2016 – October 2020
  • Associate Professor, July 2016 – October 2020

Current students

OII

Sociology

Primary Care Health

Former students

Research

Current projects

  • The Futures for Online Consumption

    Participants: Professor Gina Neff, Blake DiCosola

    How might the future of consumption change how we track and monitor ourselves? This project will test different strategies for helping people make healthier choices in online food shopping.

  • AI in the News: Reshaping our Information Ecosystem

    Participants: Professor Gina Neff, Felix Simon

    This project will engage key stakeholders in the UK news industry in a public symposium to address urgent and pressing questions about news production in the age of AI.

  • Connected Fitness: Can Online Fitness Communities Facilitate Social Connectedness?

    Participants: Professor Gina Neff, Blake DiCosola, Jaimie Freeman

    This study will assess how self-tracking data shapes social communities and the support people that receive from them, mapping the roles that online fitness communities play in maintaining psychological and social wellbeing and social connectedness.

  • The A-Z of AI

    Participants: Professor Gina Neff, James Ward IV, Margaret McGrath, Blake Dicosola, Nayana Prakash

    The A-Z of AI is an interactive guide that allows anyone who is curious about AI to develop a baseline understanding of the technology.

Past projects

  • Reconfiguring Citizen Participation in Cybersecurity

    Participants: Julia Slupska, Professor Gina Neff, Scarlet Dawson Duckworth, Linda Ma, Nayana Prakash, Selina Cho

    Reconfigure is a feminist cybersecurity project that uses community-based participatory methods and feminist approaches to reconfigure cybersecurity research and build public capacity for data privacy and action.

  • AI & Data Diversity

    Participants: Professor Gina Neff

    This project seeks to advance public understanding of data diversity and the everyday decisions around AI and technology innovation. This will help build better technologies and strengthen the science on diversity in technology-led growth.

  • Data Work: Collaboration, Sense Making and the Possible Futures for Work

    Participants: Professor Gina Neff

    How do new types of data change workplace practices?

Books

  • Neff, G. and Nafus, D. (2016) Self-Tracking. MIT Press.
  • Amman, J., Carpenter, T. and Neff, G. (2015) Surviving the New Economy. Routledge.
  • Neff, G. (2012) Venture Labor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chapters

Conference papers

Journal articles

Reports

  • Slupska, J., Duckworth, S.D. and NEFF, G. (2021) Reconfigure: Feminist Action Research in Cybersecurity. Oxford, UK: Oxford Internet Institute.
  • NEFF, G., McGrath, M. and Prakash, N. (2020) AI @ Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace. Oxford: Future Says_.

Videos

Events

Blog

Press

Integrity Statement

In the past five years work my work and the work of my students has been financially supported by UK taxpayers, UK Economic and Social Research Council, UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, Google and Microsoft. As part of my science communication and policy outreach, I have served in an advisory capacity with paid talks, paid training or unpaid service on an advisory board or working group with the following organizations: AI Now, Configuring Light Project at LSE, Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA (C2I2), University of Copenhagen, the European Commission Joint Research Centre, Data & Society Research Institute, DigiMed, GMG Ventures, IAC, ING Bank, Minderoo Foundation, Northern Illinois University, Understanding Public Uses of Data and Dashboards Project at UC Irvine, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Royal Society, Saïd School of Business Executive Education, Structure Tone, University of Calgary Gairdner Lecture, VIRT-EU H2020 Project, The Women’s Forum for Economy & Society,  Zinc VC.

I have provided consultancy services for ESRC, UNESCO, OECD and the IAB.

I serve as the chair of the scientific committee of UKRI’s Trusted Autonomous Systems programme and on the board of the ESRC’s Strategic Advisory Network. I chair the board of advisors for the social media start-up Bright and advise two Oxford student-based entrepreneurship groups, Oxford Entrepreneurs and the Christ Church Entrepreneurs Circle.