Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipino American storyteller, poet, artist, and scholar, and she is an assistant teaching professor in the art department and Principal Founding Faculty for Creative Technologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her creative and research interests include voice recognition, speech technologies, assistive tech, radio, sound production, feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, race, and gender. Santos’ work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Rewire Festival, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, the Natalie and James Thompson Gallery, and the GLBT Historical Society. Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Slate, and Vice Motherboard. She is also cofounder and cohost of Five & Nine, a podcast newsletter at the intersection of magic, career and economic justice.

Santos is also a steward and mentor to Collective Action School, an online, experimental school for tech workers. She also cofounded REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective, and she currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Processing Foundation, a member of the Governance Board for Gray Area, and as an advisor to art and culture organizations, including slash art, POWRPLNT, Looking Glass, and House of Alegria. 

Project Description

The Infrastructure of Feeling: Voices of Emergency and Crisis Media is a research project that investigates the complex relationships between care, crisis preparedness, and surveillance. The project aims to bring awareness related to both how emergency infrastructures operate and the psychological challenges of serving the public as a first responder. Another necessary area that will be researched is the effects of automation in relation to the emergency dispatcher’s role. With language detection softwares on the rise, this work will examine the multitude of ways the public gains greater awareness of technology that might provide supplemental care needed in life threatening situations.

Santos served as an External Evaluator for the 2022 Just Tech Fellowship.