Ethan Greist is a PhD student in the Sociology department at Notre Dame. He employs network, computational, and historical methods to study how political institutions and emergent technologies jointly shape one another. He is particularly interested in determining which aspects of technological impact flow from the inherit material attributes of technology, and which aspects of impact flow from politically and economically mediated social choices surrounding technological development or deployment. This encompasses an interest in how the existing consequences of technology shape future decision making around technological production and diffusion. He plans to pursue this interests in his dissertation using a multi-methods approach drawing on both case studies of policy discourse surrounding historical technological transitions, as well as computational studies of the political impact of specific focal technologies.
Before coming to Notre Dame, Ethan earned his MA in Social Sciences at the University of Chicago where his thesis used spatial analysis, network analysis, and archival methods to demonstrated how colonial and economic interests shaped the deployment of road and railroad technology in Puerto Rico in favor of a cash-crop-to-port model and away from a city-to-city model. Before that, he worked in a policy think tank where he employed computational text analysis to study the evolution of U.S. state and federal regulation. Before that, he earned his BA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University, where his thesis used content analysis and archival methods to show that the Chinese “social credit system” to that point had prioritized the automated enforcement of existing laws for more efficient social management over the furtherance of long-satisfied social surveillance goals.