By Kate Rich

The eScience Staff Spotlight is a series featuring individual members of our team and their career journey. This week’s featured staff member is Senior Social Scientist Anissa Tanweer.

From field site to workplace, eScience has come to serve many different roles for Anissa over the years. Being a qualitative interpretivist researcher at a data science institute is a unique role to begin with and she has certainly had a unique path. Throughout her career, she followed her evolving interests across various academic fields and continents. One interest, however, has always guided her work and ethnographic research: as Anissa observes, “I’m very interested in learning about other people’s perspectives.”

It was that desire to understand a different point of view that led her to study Anthropology when she was an undergraduate student at the University of Pittsburgh. While she completed her studies, she got as much educational experience abroad as possible. As part of her work study, she went on an archaeological expedition in Kazakhstan. She also spent a semester studying in India and went on a service learning trip to Brazil. 

After college, she worked at nonprofit organizations devoted to environmental justice and transportation equity. She did a stint as a massage therapist as well before deciding to pivot back to academia where she pursued a Masters in Journalism and Near Eastern Studies. Anissa wrote her thesis on the emergence of independent media in Afghanistan and international support surrounding it. As part of this work, she spent a summer working at the first independent news media organization in Afghanistan. 

Being half Afghan, Anissa had many extended family members in Afghanistan who welcomed her there. Even with these connections, she learned a lot by living outside of the United States during and after her first graduate degree. After her masters, she returned to Afghanistan on a Fulbright public diplomacy grant from the State Department to work with a women’s organization in Nangarhar. Then she stuck around to teach English at the American University of Kabul and work for the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit. When reflecting on her extensive international involvement, Anissa shared that “I think there is something about putting myself in situations where I am an outsider to try to learn from those on the inside and that’s essentially what ethnography does.”

That excitement for research brought her back to graduate school again, this time to pursue a PhD in Communication at the University of Washington. She was drawn to several topics, but found herself especially interested in a Theories of Technology and Society seminar in her department. She was fascinated by social examinations of technology and united that interest with her passion for fieldwork methods. 

In the middle of her coursework, she needed to find a site for a fieldwork seminar. Through some mutual connections, she ended up encountering the eScience Institute. Always drawn to the unfamiliar, she found herself studying data scientists without knowing much about data science. She observed the Incubator Program, now known as the Data Science and AI Accelerator, and was drawn to the unique workspace the data scientists cultivated over time. For two days a week, everyone would huddle around a conference table and collaborate closely on research projects. 

Anissa describes herself as getting “sucked in” to the rare interdisciplinary space offered by eScience and wrote her dissertation on ethnographic work she conducted at the institute. When she graduated, an ethnographer role opened up at eScience and she was asked to join. Since then, her relationship with eScience has shifted as it is no longer her field site, but she notes that “I still try to bring that kind of ethnographic sensibility to the kind of work that I do here whether its running programs like Data Science for Social Good or serving on committees like helping to launch the Data Science minor.” Something that was important to her when she took on the role of directing the Data Science for Social Good program was that “we are not just presuming that we are doing social good because we say we are, but that this is really about figuring out can we and how do we try to have some sort of good impact on society while doing data science.”

When she is not involved with eScience programming, she does her own research on how digital technologies, software, and data intensive ways of thinking about the world are changing scientific practices. Recently, Anissa returned from Scotland where she was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Technomoral Futures at the University of Edinburgh. While she was there she was working on a book about the rise of data science and the spread of data-intensive research approaches in the academy.  Additionally, she is a Digital Good Network fellow and recently returned from yet another research opportunity abroad at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge.

In an environment full of data-driven research, Anissa seeks to understand the processes and people that underlie knowledge production. We are so grateful to finally have her back in Seattle with us where we get to enjoy her thoughtful insight and empathetic approach to understanding the world around her.