Sasha Costanza-Chock

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a communications scholar, author, and activist. They are an associate professor at Northeastern University and a faculty affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

Education and academic career
Costanza-Chock received their A.B. from Harvard University, M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. After receiving their Ph.D., Costanza-Chock took up a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they were Associate Professor of Civic Media.

Contributions
Costanza-Chock researches social movements, media, and communications technologies, and has published work about Occupy Wall Street, the immigrant rights movement in the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission, the CRIS campaign for communication rights, and media policy, among other areas. As an activist they have contributed to citizen media projects such as VozMob, Transmission, and Indymedia.

Their first book ''Out of the Shadows, into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement'' was published by The MIT Press in 2014. Writing about DREAM Act scholarship for The Journal of Higher Education, Michael Olivas called the book "a fascinating and liberating study of the social media used by various DREAMer factions". In a review in Information, Communication & Society Koen Leurs called the book "a reflective, situated, historically and contextually aware account of rights movements in the United States".

In 2018, their paper, Design Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination won a $10,000 essay competition in the Journal of Design and Science. Their second book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need was published in March 2020 by MIT Press

Costanza-Chock is regularly cited as an academic expert on media and activism topics, including the student response to the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, movements to unionize tech workers, and the doxing of white supremacists.

Other activities
Costanza-Chock is a board member of Allied Media Projects.

Honors and awards

 * 2021 Engineering & Technology PROSE Award Finalist for their book Design Justice
 * 2019 MIT John S.W. Kellett '47 Award, "for an exceptional and/or sustained commitment to creating a more welcoming environment at MIT" for LGBTQ+ individuals