Nikko Stevens
Assistant Professor of Statistical and Data Sciences
Critical technology researcher and software engineer studying data infrastructures and social inequality.
Dr. Nikko Stevens is a critical technology researcher, software engineer, and community organizer. As an academic, Stevens studies the ways that data infrastructures–data models, databases, data structures–can reinforce existing social inequality, and, crucially, how we can use data infrastructures to guide us towards the worlds we wish to build. As a software engineer, they led the architecture of web properties for billion-dollar corporations like Coca-Cola, Sony, and Instagram, and their work won numerous awards, including at SXSW. As a community organizer, Stevens’s work in the Drupal community earned them the Aaron Winborn Award and recognitions by Red Hat and The Linux Foundation. They are currently a postdoctoral researcher at MIT where they are writing Abolitionist Engineering, a book about data infrastructure, software engineering, and the contemporary prison abolition movement. As of Fall 2025, they are an Assistant Professor of Statistical and Data Sciences at Smith College.
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Trans data epistemologies: Transgender ways of knowing with data
Big Data & Society · 2025
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Trans Data: A Research and Design Agenda from Trans Activists' Transformative Data Science
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025
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Paradoxes of Openness: Trans Experiences in Open Source Software
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2024
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Seeing infrastructure: race, facial recognition and the politics of data
Cultural Studies · 2021
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The unremarked optimum: whiteness, optimization, and control in the database revolution
Review of Communication · 2021