Roderic N. Crooks

Biography

Roderic N. Crooks, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. A scholar working at the intersection of race, technology, and education, Crooks examines how educational technology and datafication practices shape and reproduce racial inequality in urban schools and communities. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies in 2016, where his dissertation examined one-to-one tablet computer programs in urban education.

Crooks is the author of the monograph "Access is Capture: Race, Edtech, and Datafication" (University of California Press, 2024), which analyzes how educational technology systems function as mechanisms of surveillance and control in racialized educational contexts. His research has been supported by a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award for his project on community organizing in datafied worlds, as well as additional NSF grants examining public uses of data and dashboards and addressing financial misinformation in minoritized communities. His work has appeared in journals including Big Data & Society, Surveillance & Society, Science, Technology, & Human Values, and The Information Society, and he received a Best Paper Award at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in 2021.

Crooks was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow from 2016 to 2018 and received the UCI Inclusive Excellence Teaching Award in 2021-2022. He serves as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation and has held editorial and review roles for numerous journals and conferences in information science, human-computer interaction, and science and technology studies. Prior to his academic career, Crooks earned an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and worked as a programmer-analyst at The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles.

Education

• Ph.D. in Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 2016
• M.L.I.S., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011
• M.F.A., University of Iowa, 2005
• B.F.A., School of Visual Arts, 1999

Distinctions

• Winter Residency (Finalist), Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown, 2006
• Finalist, Best American Short Stories, 2006
• E.J. Josey Award, 2009
• Sotheby's Institute of Art Research Award, 2015
• UCI Inclusive Excellence Teaching Award, 2021-2022
• The Marianne Afifi Fellowship and The Helen R. Hancock Fellowship, 2010
• University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2016-2018
• Charles E. Harless Award, 2011
• Silas M. Rhodes Memorial Scholarship, 2000