Dr Thao Phan

Thao Phan is a feminist science and technology studies (STS) researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She is a Lecturer in Sociology (STS) at the Research School for Social Sciences at the Australian National University (ANU). Her research examines the role of AI systems in constituting categories such as gender, race, class, and nation. 

She has published on topics including whiteness and the aesthetics of AI, big-data-driven techniques of racial classification, and the commercial capture of AI ethics research. She is the co-editor of the volumes An Anthropogenic Table of Elements (University of Toronto Press) and Economies of Virtue: The Circulation of 'Ethics' in AI (Institute of Network Cultures), and her writing appears in journals such as Big Data & Society, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technosocience, Science as Culture, and Cultural Studies.

She is an editorial board member of the internatioal journal's Science, Technology & Human Values, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and International Journal of Cultural Studies. 

She is an elected Council member for the Society for the Social Studies of Science, serves a member of the Australian Academy of Science’s National Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science, and is the co-founder of AusSTS—Australia’s largest network of STS scholars.