Welcome!

Hello!

My name is Ian, and I like thinking about technology, organizations, and social theory.

I am a New York State licensed social worker LMSW, a Ph.D. student in Social Welfare and Interactive Technology and Pedagogy at the CUNY Graduate Center, an adjunct lecturer at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, and a technology enthusiast with a dose of healthy skepticism. I grew up in rural Vermont, and landed in NYC after stints in Montreal, Beijing, Vancouver, Washington DC, Champaign-Urbana, Chicago, and Burlington, VT. Prior to becoming a social worker, I worked as a baker, an organic farmer, a bartender, and a construction laborer.

I also enjoy playing with technology through video games, virtual reality, electronic music, and cooking. I play bass guitar and was trained as a jazz musician with a strong foundation in improvization. I dabble in recording solo music that heavily relies upon digital effects processing and looping.

Research Interests

In my social work career, I often work at the overlap between software implementation, client services, and business operations. I am regularly the go-to "good with technology" generalist that gets asked to help out with technical problems, before involving an IT specialist. I have experience with assisting organizations as they transition to new digital platforms; on previous projects I have trained staff in new systems, developed protocols and policies related to software use, and helped organizations make decisions about technology use. 

As a scholar, I am interested in exploring how new technologies create new social and political realities, and also, how they create new (and often unexpected) constraints and consequences. My background in social work and the humanities helps me to stay grounded in seeing technology as inherently social and political. My intellectual training is steeped in post-structuralist philosophy and I am strongly inclined toward a social constructionist viewpoint, grounded in organization theory and Science and Technology Studies.

I went back to school to understand the social context of the technological changes I saw occurring while working as a clinical mental health practitioner during the COVID-19 pandemic. These changes have long-term implications and require new thinking about existing issues. Since digging into the subject I developed a strong foundation of political and ethical debates around technology and society.

As a doctoral student, I am trying to increase my programming skills in R, Python, and SQL to better understand how data infrastructures operate, and the underlying logic of artificial intelligence design. Having gained some exposure to Python's NLTK library, I am very interested in developing natural language processing applications that can be used in social work organizations.

I am also interested in pedagogical applications of computational thinking, digital literacies, and emerging technologies such as blockchain and Web3. I want to develop coursework and educational content for social workers that can address both computational social science and digital humanities perspectives. Social work is both an art and a science, so it can draw from these complementary frameworks.

Organization of website

I designed this website to organize a portfolio describing my work. The project portfolio highlights a few themes of digital projects I have worked on over my career. You can navigate the different pages from drop-down menus :

I plan to build a digital garden from here in 2023.