María P. Angel

María P. Angel (she/her) is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Law at the University of Washington and a student in the Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS) Graduate Certificate Program. She works as a research assistant at the Tech Policy Lab, where she conducts research with Professor Ryan Calo. She is also an articles editor for the Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts. Prior to starting her Ph.D., María was a researcher at the Colombian think-and-do tank Dejusticia. She also interned at New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) and will soon join Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective (SMC) as an STS Ph.D. summer intern. María holds a dual B.A. in Law and Political Science and a master’s degree in Administrative Law. She is a Fulbright grantee and an IAPP Westin Scholar Award recipient.

View María's artifact and accompanying video (coming soon).

María's project summary:

In my Ph.D. research project, I am exploring the intellectual history of privacy law scholarship in America. To do so, I have been conducting document analysis of (1) the papers presented at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC) between 2008 and 2022; (2) the law review articles cited in that first set of papers and published between 1992 and 2007. Likewise, I am conducting oral history exercises, where I interview a purposely drawn representative sample of American privacy law scholars, asking them to talk about their professional careers as privacy scholars, the privacy issues they have explored over time, the people they have worked with, the evolution of the concept of privacy in their own scholarship, and the desirable futures they expect to achieve through privacy regulation. Using this approach, I expect to be able to: (i) trace changes in their understanding of information privacy over time, and (ii) understand the techno-legal imaginaries that drive their scholarship.

My project is interdisciplinary, since I combine elements from my two main fields: Law & Technology and Science, Technology, and Social Studies (STS). Likewise, this research is intended to be open. The final transcript of each complete oral history, along with some video clips from the interviews will be deposited in The Internet Archive (archive.org), a non-profit digital library of cultural artifacts in digital form. Therefore, researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public will be able to freely access them online.

For this fellowship, I would like to create a short video (3 minutes maximum) and a poster that include clips/quotes from some of the oral history interviews I am currently conducting. What do American privacy law scholars see as the desirable future of information privacy? Through these artifacts, spectators will be able to gain a glimpse (a "sneak peek") into the techno-legal imaginaries that are currently driving privacy law scholarship in the United States.