Safiya Umoja Noble is the David O. Sears presidential endowed chair of social sciences and professor of gender studies, African American studies, and information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the director of the UCLA Center on Race & Digital Justice and co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech & Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She also serves as interim director of the UCLA DataX Initiative, leading work in critical data studies.
Noble is the author of the bestselling book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York University Press, 2018), which examines racist and sexist algorithmic harm in commercial search engines. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Fellow for her groundbreaking work on algorithmic bias.
Early Life and Education
Noble grew up in Fresno, California and studied sociology at California State University, Fresno, with a focus on African American studies and ethnic studies. While at Fresno State, she was involved in the campus political scene, protesting against apartheid and campaigning for racial and gender equality. She was an active member of the Associated Students, Inc. and the California State Student Association. After graduating, Noble worked for more than a decade in multicultural marketing, advertising, and public relations.
She later attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for graduate studies, earning a master's degree and Ph.D. in library and information science. Her 2012 dissertation, Searching for black girls: old traditions in new media, considered how gender and race manifest on technology platforms.
Career
Noble was appointed assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Department of African-American Studies, the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, and the Institute for Communication Research. In 2014, she joined UCLA's Department of Information Studies. She received the UCLA Early Career Award in 2016 and was appointed a Hellman Fellow the same year. Noble received academic tenure at UCLA and was promoted to associate professor in 2018.
From 2017 to 2019, Noble joined the University of Southern California as a visiting assistant professor, focusing on the politics and human and civil rights concerns of digital media platforms, including the integration of these issues in STEM education.
On 25 September 2020, Noble was named one of the 25 members of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an independent monitoring group for Facebook. In October 2020, she was featured in conversation with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex on the harms of technology. Her book Algorithms of Oppression was cited by Meghan for outlining how "the digital space really shapes our thinking about race."
Noble was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021. In 2022, she was the inaugural recipient of the NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award. She has also been appointed a commissioner to the University of Oxford Commission on Artificial Intelligence and Good Governance and nominated to the Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity at the World Economic Forum in 2020.
Research
Noble's academic research focuses on the Internet and its impact on society. Her work is sociological and interdisciplinary, examining how digital media intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, power, and technology. Her expertise on algorithmic discrimination and technology bias has been covered by Rolling Stone, The Guardian, BBC, CNN International, USA Today, Wired, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and The New York Times. Her popular writing includes critiques on the loss of public goods to Big Tech companies.
Her research also focuses on gender, technology, and culture, and how they influence the design and use of the internet. Her work has appeared in academic publications and popular media outlets including Time and Bitch. Noble co-edited the books Emotions, Technology & Design and The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online. She is co-editor of the "Commentary & Criticism" section of the journal Feminist Media Studies and serves on several academic journal and advisory boards, including for Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education and the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies.
Algorithms of Oppression
Noble's first book, Algorithms of Oppression, was published by NYU Press in 2018 and has been reviewed in journals including the Los Angeles Review of Books. It was featured in the New York Public Library 2018 Best Books for Adults. The book considers how bias against people of color is embedded into supposedly neutral search engines. It explores how racism, especially Anti-Black racism, is generated, maintained, and reproduced by the internet. Noble is concerned with how the Black community is commercialized by technology companies. She researches companies like Google and Facebook and considers how their algorithms "black-box" information; for example, when a search term is entered, it is unclear how results are derived. Her work aims to change the perceptions of marginalized people in technology. She has blogged about "Digital Infrastructures of Race and Gender" for the Fotomuseum's online platform and has given talks and interviews about the book.
Select Publications
- Joyce, Kelly; Smith-Doerr, Laurel; Alegria, Sharla; Bell, Susan; Cruz, Taylor; Hoffman, Steve G.; Noble, Safiya Umoja; Shestakofsky, Benjamin (2021). "Toward a Sociology of Artificial Intelligence: A Call for Research on Inequalities and Structural Change". Socius. 7 2378023121999581. doi:10.1177/2378023121999581.
- Noble, Safiya Umoja (2018). Algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press. ISBN 9781479837243.
- Noble, Safiya U.; Austin, Jeanie; Sweeney, Miriam E.; McKeever, Lucas; Sullivan, Elizabeth (2013). "Changing Course: Collaborative Reflections of Teaching/Taking 'Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Information Professions'". Journal of Education for Library and Information Science. 55 (3): 212–222.
- Noble, Safiya U. (15 January 2017). "Google and the Misinformed Public". The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Affiliations and Service
Noble is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a non-profit organization that provides services to victims of cybercrimes. She is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and a chartering member of the International Panel on the Information Environment. Her work intersects with fields such as Artificial intelligence and Machine learning, and she has contributed to discussions on Generative AI and Large language model ethics. She has collaborated with institutions like Stanford AI Lab and MIT CSAIL on related research initiatives.