Alexandra Mateescu
she/her
Data & Society
Alexandra Mateescu is a researcher with Data & Society’s Labor Futures program, where she has worked for the last decade on producing in-depth qualitative research, curating accessible public resources and convening workshops, and contributing to efforts to strengthen worker rights and further economic justice.
Alexandra is interested in understanding how new technologies often deepen and entrench existing inequities and social precarities, particularly in low-wage industries. In the past, she has worked on projects investigating worker experiences across the gig platform economy, the unacknowledged human labor behind automation within service industries and agricultural labor, the intersections of state surveillance, disability, and criminalization within the US welfare systems, the exploitation of gaps in labor protections in the post-Covid era onwards, and the role of new technologies in care work. Her most recent research has focused on workers’ complex relationships with data and the increasingly extractive dynamics of data collection, as well as the emerging impacts of generative AI technologies within often overlooked industries.
Alexandra holds a Master of Arts and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.