Sarah Fox
Assistant Professor Carnegie Mellon University
- Pittsburgh PA
Sarah Fox's research examines how technological artifacts challenge or propagate social exclusions.
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Media Appearances
Carnegie Mellon Community Shines at SXSW 2025 — an Intersection of Culture, Tech and Innovation
CMU News online
2025-03-21
At another session, Sarah Fox and Nikolas Martelaro presented their collaboration with transit operators and their unions aimed at understanding the impacts of future technologies on transportation workers. The two explained the potential to leverage AI in "Creating Safer, More Equitable Public Transit Systems."
Fox explained that the role of bus operators often goes beyond driving. They are often responsible for balancing the environment of the vehicle and the wellness of passengers.
“Bus operators regularly described unexpected circumstances, both in navigating the road and managing the social environment of the bus. These circumstances often require split-second decision making and nuanced social judgments,” she said.
Sidewalk robots could shovel snow or act as crossing guards
Futurity online
2024-06-06
In their research, Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science faculty members Sarah Fox and Nikolas Martelaro highlight potential issues sidewalk robots encounter during deployment and propose solutions to mitigate them before the robots hit the streets.
A (hypothetical, incremental) revolution in automated transit
Politico online
2024-05-01
I called up Sarah Fox and Nikolas Martelaro, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and authors of a 2022 policy paper on automated public transit, to ask them exactly how close, or far, we might be from that “win.” As it turns out, it’s a little bit more complicated than simply taking the driver out of every bus. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows:
Media
Social
Accomplishments
DIS Best Paper Honorable Mention Award
2021
Special Recognition for Outstanding Reviewing, ACM CSCW
2021
DIS Best Paper Honorable Mention Award
2020
CHI Best Paper Award
2019
Special Recognition for Outstanding Reviewing, ACM DIS
2019
Education
University of Washington
Ph.D.
Human Centered Design & Engineering
2018
Georgia Institute of Technology
M.S.
2013
The University of Georgia
Bachelor's Degree
2009
Event Appearances
Career Mentoring Workshop
February 2022 | Computing Research Association Washington, DC
Research Grants
“Regulating automation to ensure worker health and safety in the hospitality sector”
Block Center for Technology and Society
2022-23
“Developing Community-Led & Equity-Focused Public Interest Technology Curriculum”
Public Interest Technology University Network,
2022-23
“Upskilling hospitality workers and re-designing workplaces for the future of automation”
NSF Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier
2021-25
Articles
‘Hey ChatGPT, Finish This Building…’: A Worker‐Led AI Agenda for the Construction Industry
Architectural Design2024
Instead of AI systems being foisted on workplaces and workers from the top down via a one‐size‐fits all approach, Sarah Fox, director of Carnegie Mellon University's Tech Solidarity Lab, investigates how more participative practices might enable staff to develop equitable workload procedures in conjunction with machine learning systems. How can businesses transform to incorporate AI without the nuances of mass redundancies and human supplication to such processes?
Hormonal advantage: retracing exploitative histories of workplace menstrual tracking
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience2021
Technologies and self-help protocols associated with menstrual tracking have gained popularity over the past decade, with wellness consultants such as Alisa Vitti at the helm. Through careful monitoring and lifestyle changes, such techniques promise to unleash an inherent hormonal advantage that can extend one’s personal and professional pursuits. Though seemingly new, these approaches to menstrual monitoring have an historical lineage born of corporate management. Now being sold as feminist, they draw on a belief in menstrual deficit, or an understanding of menstruation along productivist lines focused on curbing workplace absenteeism and enhancing personal optimization. In bringing together cases from over the last century, this paper seeks to establish a through line of economization and imagine instead how workplace tracking might be leveraged toward worker mobilization and bargaining for collective gains.
The ‘working body’: interrogating and reimagining the productivist impulses of transhumanism through crip-centered speculative design
Somatechnics2020
Appeals to ‘nature’ have historically led to normative claims about who is rendered valuable. These understandings elevate a universal, working body (read able-bodied, white, producing capital) that design and disability studies scholar Aimi Hamraie argues ‘has served as a template […] for centuries’ (2017: 20), becoming reified through our architectural, political, and technological infrastructures. Using the framing of the cyborg, we explore how contemporary assistive technologies have the potential to both reproduce and trouble such normative claims. The modern transhumanism movement imagines cyborg bodies as self-contained and invincible, championing assistive technologies that seek to assimilate disabled people towards ever-increasing standards of independent productivity and connecting worth with the body's capacity for labor.
