Sasha Akhavi

Intro

I study what making software can teach us about being human.

After 20 years in the software industry of Silicon Valley, Raleigh / Durham and Toronto, I am now a Ph.D. candidate (comps passed 1/2025) in the Science and Technology Studies program at York University. My research intervenes in current STS scholarship about tech's impacts on society to identify a potent and overlooked resource for improving those impacts: The value systems enacted by software team practices.

I am interested in online mis/disinformation, human nature after digital technology, scale theory, assemblage theory, and actor-network theory.

Recent Contributions

• TALK: "More Sustainable Than Sustainable: AI" Presented at STS-HUB Berlin 2025
• TALK: "Decoding a Natural Philosophy of Software Practice" Presented at 4S meeting 8 November 2023
• REVIEW: "Scaling the heights – and the depths: zooming out and in on sociality and science." Review of Joshua DiCaglio Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry. Science As Culture 31 July 2023
• TALK: "Imaginary Friends for Unfriendly Imaginaries: User Personas, Research Personas, and Technical Persons as Methods of Sociotechnical Investigation and Influence." Presented at Canadian Communications Association meeting 31 May 2023
• OP ED: "Elon Musk could be our catalyst to dispense with the myth of the lone tech genius." The Globe and Mail 24 November 2022

Current & Forthcoming

• ARTICLE: "Portraits of Mis/Disinformation via the Persona Method" co-author Rory Sharp, solicited for International Journal of Communication 2024