Taylor Cruz

Associate Professor of Sociology and Health Sciences

Taylor M. Cruz is a sociologist of science, technology, and medicine. She studies the societal dimensions of data analytics and emerging technologies, including as these appear in health and biomedicine. Her scholarship on electronic health records and biomedical data is featured in Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science & Medicine, and Big Data & Society, and has received awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She recently guest edited a special issue on the sociology of artificial intelligence (with Kelly Joyce, Drexel) and co-created the critical STS and ethnographic zine “AI for Whose Good? Lessons from Community Resistance to Automation at the Port of Los Angeles” (with Sophie Wang, Free Radicals). She received her PhD in Sociology from UC San Francisco, where she remains a network affiliate with the Emancipatory Sciences Lab.

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Awards & Honors

Editorial board member, American Sociological Review (2024-)
Donald W. Light Award for Applied or Public Practice of Medical Sociology, American Sociological Association
Ida B. Wells-Troy Duster Award for Anti-Racism in Science, Knowledge, and Technology (SKAT), American Sociological Association
Diana Forsythe Dissertation Award for Social Studies of Science, Technology, and Health, UCSF Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine
Health, Health Policy, and Health Services Best Paper Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems

Selected Publications

Kelly Joyce and Taylor M. Cruz. 2024. “A Sociology of Artificial Intelligence: Inequalities, Power, and Data Justice.” Socius 10. https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231241275393

Taylor M. Cruz. 2024. “Racing the Machine: Data Analytic Technologies and Institutional Inscription of Racialized Health Injustice.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 65(1): 110-125.

Sophie Wang and Taylor M. Cruz. 2023. “AI for Whose Good? Lessons from Community Resistance to Automation at the Port of Los Angeles.” Critical STS and Ethnographic Zine. Available online (https://taylormcruz.com/zine-ai).

Taylor M. Cruz. 2022. “The Social Life of Biomedical Data: Capturing, Obscuring, and Envisioning Care in the Digital Safety-Net.” Social Science & Medicine 294: 114670.

Taylor M. Cruz and Emily Allen Paine. 2021. “Capturing Patients, Missing Inequities: Data Standardization on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity across Unequal Clinical Contexts.” Social Science & Medicine 285: 114295.

Community & Professional Leadership

American Sociological Association; Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)