Daniel Mwesigwa

2026–27

I'm on the job market for tenure-track & postdoc roles, and for research scientist & AI policy roles in industry. Send me recommendations.

Hi there! I’m Daniel, a fifth-year PhD student in Information Science at Cornell University, lucky to be co-advised by Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Steve Jackson. I study the design and governance of sociotechnical AI systems, as well as the benefits and costs these systems produce. My dissertation examines the making of financial infrastructures alongside their policy implications on social and economic life in the global majority world, drawing on lenses from social informatics, machine learning, and anthropology. My research also centers moral values and their role in structuring expert and ordinary practice in different spheres of life. I’ve previously worked as a technology researcher and policy analyst, and am a research affiliate of CIPESA, a leading technology policy think tank in Africa. I was previously an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard from 2020 to 2024.

News

Apr ’26

Tutorial on “AI alignment as democratic project” accepted at FAccT 2026. This is joint work with Jenny Fu (Cornell) and Princewill Okoroafor (Harvard)

Apr ’26

CHI ’26 paper “Risk, Data, Alignment: Making Credit Scoring Work in Kenya” presented in Barcelona

Apr ’26

Presented “Risk, Data, Alignment” to Keith Breckenridge’s group at WiSER, University of Witswatersrand (via Zoom)

Recent Notes

Publications

Conferences

CSCW  ’26
To Tango or to Disentangle? Making Ethnography Public in the Digital Age
Daniel Mwesigwa, Cyan DeVeaux, Palashi Vaghela
CHI  ’26
Risk, Data, Alignment: Making Credit Scoring Work in Kenya
Daniel Mwesigwa, Steven J. Jackson, Christopher Csikszentmihalyi
CHI  ’24
Air/time Travel: Rethinking Appropriation in Global HCI and Futures of Electronic Exchange
Daniel Mwesigwa, Christopher Csikszentmihalyi

Book Chapters

Forthcoming  ’26
Exchange, obligation, accountability: Moral orders of technology repair in Kampala, Uganda
Daniel Mwesigwa, Steven J. Jackson
Stanford U Press  ’25
From Threat to Advocacy
Lisa Garbe, Daniel Mwesigwa, Toussaint Nothias

Workshop & Short Papers

DL Indaba  ’25
Against ‘softmaxing’ culture
Daniel Mwesigwa
CHI EA  ’25
The (Un)making of Data Subjects in Digital Credit Repair Practice
Daniel Mwesigwa