Sohyeon Hwang

Sohyeon is a Postdoctoral Associate at Princeton University, in the Center for Information Technology Policy. Her research work asks how everyday people can shape the governance of technologies underpinning their social, economic, and political lives. She pursues this by examining community-based models of governing, which give people opportunities to negotiate the potential harms technologies expose them to. Taking an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach, her research: explains how communities devise governance practices; expands the organizational and technical power of community governance; and identifies strategies to make community governance effective and sustainable. Together, this work contributes empirical insights, frameworks, and tools that build capacity for collective decision-making toward societal benefit. To translate insights into community policy and design, she engages closely with communities throughout the research process and regularly shares work in community venues. Recently, the empirical focus of her work has been on community and cooperatively-owned technologies, such as decentralized social media or worker-owned systems.