Angela Okune

I’m Angela Hitomi Skye Crandall Okune. I study and work on scholarly research infrastructures including but not limited to open (ethnographic) data; (in)equity in open science; and open access publishing, especially as it relates to the African continent.

I care about how we might do research in ways that are experienced as less “extroverted” for Western audiences–using Paulin Hountondji’s sense of the term–and work on holding space for working out how scholars and practitioners could more intentionally and care-fully design research to be more regenerative in and for communities. I work on this through service with the Society for the Social Studies of Science Council, Research Data Share platform, Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography, and Open Access journal Engaging Science, Technology, and Society.

I am originally from Honolulu, Hawaii where my parents still live. I have extended kinship ties with people in Japan, Taiwan, Lithuania, Arizona, and Kenya. I studied in Washington, DC for four cold years before moving to Nairobi, Kenya in 2010. I lived and worked in Nairobi (during which time I also met my spouse) for nearly five years at Nairobi’s flagship tech innovation hub before moving to Irvine, California to begin a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California. I am currently based in San Francisco, California with my family. I work with a team at Code for Science and Society to support Open Science communities of practice.

Find my academic CV here or my shorter resume here. Find a list of my recent publications here.

Find the open data portal that I manage which includes data from my fieldwork here and context about why I set it up here.

Read a journal article published in Catalyst here that details how I leveraged an open source ethnographic data sharing platform for my doctoral fieldwork. I use the affordances of the ethnographic data share platform to play with linked qualitative data in this thought piece here on Open Access in Africa. I co-authored a blog post reflecting on the changing expectations and opportunities for scholarly societies here, which is based on my ongoing service as a Council member of the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

My doctoral dissertation is currently published as a PDF on the University of California digital repository here but will also (eventually) be published in a more interactive format here.

Learn more here about Quotidian Data, a research institute I co-founded that focuses on advancing understanding of the socio-technical layers of knowledge production and stewardship especially related to data.