María Belén Albornoz

Principal Investigator

María Belén Albornoz is the Principal Investigator of the Fairwork Project in Ecuador. She is a Professor and Researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO-Ecuador), Coordinator of the PhD Program on Public Policy, and Coordinator of the Science, Technology and Society Laboratory (CTS-LAB). She serves as President of the Ecuadorian Society for Social Studies, as Council Member of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), and as Board Member of the Society for the Studies of New and Emerging Technologies (S.NET).

Her current research concerns technology transfer models; public policy of science, technology and innovation; big data; ICTs an educación; social innovation; and fairwork. In 2017 she was a Fulbright Scholar at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a Visiting Scholar at Aalborg University in Denmark, where she worked in theorizing imaginaries of innovation and policy network analysis. Her book publications include Computers and Black Boxes (2012), Technological Policies and Political Technologies. Dynamics of Inclusion Development and Innovation in Latin America (2015), Engineering, Innovation, and Social Technology (2017).

For the Fairwork project, Belén leads the research strategy in Ecuador. This includes identifying Fairwork thresholds for the Ecuadorian context, interviewing gig workers, platforms executives, and other stakeholders; ranking platforms, and disseminating the results.