Join panelists Taina Bucher (University of Oslo), Brian Jefferson (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Niall Docherty (Microsoft Research) to discuss digital temporalities as they intersect with apparatuses of power and knowledge.
Monday April 12th — 9am CDT/3pm BST/4pm CEST — Online
Hosted by the Social Media Collective
Each speaker will give a ten-minute presentation, followed by interactive break-out rooms and a participatory discussion. The event will be held virtually and is scheduled to last 90 minutes. The event is free and open to the public. Please visit the Eventbrite page to register to attend, and receive a Teams link:
This is an interactive event, with discussions in the breakout rooms providing the grounds for a collective conversation surrounding digital time/power to emerge. The talks will invite dialogue amongst participants by questioning the way temporality is targeted, discursively produced, and materially managed in distinct sociotechnical environments.
Taina Bucher will examine the specific temporal regime of algorithmic media as characterized by a logic of right-time, or kairos. Bucher is an associate professor in media and communication at the University of Oslo.
How do media platforms determine when the time is right, with what implications? Where does right-time materialize in digital media and could we address the empirical realities of this fabrication?
Brian Jefferson will discuss how the digital revolution has both accelerated geographic development and underdevelopment. Brian is an associate professor of geography and geographic information systems at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.
In what ways has the digital revolution upended and reproduced established inequalities? What does this tell us of technological progress?
Niall Docherty will explore how tools of digital well-being promise a certain future of human flourishing inflected by neoliberal discourses of responsibilization and self-control. Niall is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England, within the Social Media Collective.
What are the political, economic, and social futures promised to users through adopting “healthy” digital habits? How do narratives of the good life condition action online?
In collectively examining these types of questions and more, the symposium will cultivate an interdisciplinary discussion able to explore varied experiences of digital temporality and power. This will be a great chance to meet with other critical digital theorists and share ideas with the broader research community.
The SMC loves good books. And we especially love books that tackle vital societal problems in a way that’s timely but also deeply researched, that ask biting questions of institutions without turning them into straw men, that investigate technology in its real use contexts, and that complicate things that may at first appear simple. And we REALLY like books from our excellent SMC postdocs, especially when we were there to see these books become books. Latest in this illustrious group is Sarah Brayne, now an assistant professor in Sociology at UT Austin, and her book Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, from Oxford UP. The book offers an ethnographic “account of how a massive law enforcement agency leverages big data technologies to expand surveillance in the name of objective, predictive policing.”
Sarah is having a virtual book launch, in conversation with Bruce Western of Columbia University, that we highly recommend. November 20, 2pm CST. You can RSVP here, and in the process, receive a 30% discount code for the book.
The Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England (MSRNE) is looking for a two-year social media postdoctoral researcher. This position is an ideal opportunity for a scholar whose work draws on communication, media studies, anthropology, sociology, and/or science & technology studies to bring empirical and critical perspectives to bear on complex socio-technical issues. We also consider applications from candidates that might bridge SMC with one or more areas of the MSRNE lab, including machine learning and statistics, economics and computational economics, theoretical mathematics, and computational biology.
Postdoctoral researchers receive a competitive salary and benefits package, and are eligible for relocation expenses. Postdoctoral researchers are hired for a two-year term appointment following the academic calendar, starting in July 2021. The position is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Social Media Collective is comprised of full-time researchers, postdocs, visiting faculty, Ph.D. interns, and research assistants. Current projects in New England include:
– How do people build social capital with each other in remote and hybrid work, and how do those processes facilitate or harm inclusion? (Nancy Baym)
– How do social media platforms, through algorithmic design and content policies, serve as custodians of public discourse? (Tarleton Gillespie)
– What are the cultural, political, and ethical implications of on-demand platform economies as new forms and sites of semi-automated, globally-distributed digital labor? (Mary L. Gray)
– how do discourses and designs of ideal social media habits function within apparatuses of platform capitalism? (Niall Docherty)
SMC postdocs may also have the opportunity to visit and collaborate with researchers in our sister labs in New York City and Montreal.
Microsoft Research provides a vibrant multidisciplinary research environment, with an open publication policy and close links to top academic institutions around the world. The postdoctoral research positions offer emerging scholars an opportunity to develop their research career and to interact with some of the top minds in the research community.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
PhD in anthropology, communications, media studies, sociology, science & technology studies, or a related field.
A research program demonstrated by journal and conference publications.
Preferred Qualifications:
A strong social scientific or humanistic methodological, analytical, and theoretical foundation.
Strong communication skills.
The ability to work in a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary environment.
Demonstrated leadership potential in research.
Responsibilities
Postdoctoral researchers define their own research agenda. Postdocs are expected to be lively contributors to discussions in the SMC research group, and the MSR New England lab.
The ideal candidate may be trained in any number of disciplines, but should have a strong social scientific or humanistic methodological, analytical, and theoretical foundation, be interested in questions related to technology or the internet and society or culture, and be interested in working in a highly interdisciplinary environment that also includes computer scientists, mathematicians, and economists.
Application process
Submit an online application here. [11/18/20 – updated link]
To get started with your application, press the “Apply now” button. When prompted, upload your CV and provide names and contact information of three referees; one of your letter writers must be your dissertation advisor.
In addition, you must upload the following 3 documents, as attachments, to your online application:
1. a single research statement (4 page maximum length) that does the following:
outlines the questions and methodologies central to your research agenda (~ two pages);
offers a description of how your research agenda relates to research conducted by the Social Media Collective (~ one page);
provides an abstract and chapter outline of your dissertation (~ one page)
2+3. two writing samples: journal articles, book chapters, or equivalent (uploaded as two separate attachments).
Remember to press the “Submit” button at the last screen.
Requests for recommendation letters will be automatically sent to your list of referees on your behalf. NOTE: THE APPLICATION SYSTEM WILL NOT REQUEST REFERENCE LETTERS UNTIL AFTER YOU HAVE SUBMITTED YOUR APPLICATION! We recommend that you warn your letter writers in advance, so they will have their letters ready to submit as soon as they receive the prompt. The email they receive will tell them they have two weeks to respond, but consideration of application begins very quickly after the deadline – so submitting early will give them adequate time to get their letters to us. Please make sure to check back with your referees to ensure they received the request for letters of recommendation and that they sent them. You can also check the progress on individual reference requests at any time by clicking the “status” tab within your application page.
To be assured of full consideration, all of your materials need to be submitted by December 1, 2020. For more information, see here.If you have any questions about the application process, you can contact Tarleton Gillespie at tarleton@microsoft.com and please include “SMC postdoc” in the subject line.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.
If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.
In the confusion of our current times, we were not as quick about announcing the newest members of the Social Media Collective as we usually are. Like everyone, we find ourselves out of step with the timelessness of pandemic time. But as these new faces are showing up and settling in with us – on our video screens, if not in the lab – we wanted to share the good news, tell you all about them and their work.
Below you’ll meet three SMC interns, the newest postdoc to join the Social Media Collective, and a summer/fall 2020 visitor whose (virtual) arrival is just days away. And as a sign of how late this post is, the first intern you’ll meet has already finished their internship!
Tristan Gohring is a PhD student in Informatics at Indiana University. Their research intersects the fields of science and technology studies, social informatics, and gender studies. Their primary research is about gender as a classification system, and how gender classification gets used and embedded in technologies such as identification documents and online forms and profile pages. (Tristan was part of the joint MSR / E+D JEM Project PhD internship program; they were interning with us when we all had to start working from home, and they bravely completed their internship under these unexpected circumstances. Tristan really helped us think through how to move the SMC internship online. Many thanks!)
Amber Hamilton is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities interested in questions concerning race, technology, and digital media. Her dissertation, titled “Contestation and Articulations of Digital Blackness,” explores the embodiment of digital Blackness in the online lives of Black Twitter users and the multiple forms of cultural conversations that occur within the community to understand how race is articulated and maintained online. At the Social Media Collective, Amber is exploring the responses of social media and tech platforms to protests for racial justice in response to the murder of George Floyd. Amber holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Minnesota and a BA in Sociology from The Ohio State University.
Anna Gibson is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication at Stanford University working under the direction of Dr. Angèle Christin. She is interested in present and historical online communities, and her doctoral research focuses on the friction between these communities and the governance structures and organizations that make them possible. She was awarded a graduate fellowship at Stanford’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, and her work on the application of theories of democratic governance to social media platform content moderation practices has been published in Social Media + Society. This summer she is researching how platform companies talk about punishment with regards to content moderation.
Our newest postdoc, Niall Docherty recently completed his PhD at the Centre for Critical Theory, University of Nottingham. His thesis examines the material and discursive construction of Facebook’s ideal users, linking normative designations of “healthy” usership to neoliberal histories of governance through habit. Niall has a BA in Politics and an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, specialising in political theory, Modern philosophy and governmentality studies. His future projects include developing a conceptually rigorous rubric of habit to study the quality, possibility and limitations of everyday social media usage; empirically investigating how discourses of well-being are articulated in different social media environments; and further exploring how expressions of ‘living well’ on social media sites are enacted by users to function within apparatus of platform capitalism.
And finally, our faculty visitor from July-December, Angèle Christin is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and affiliated faculty in the Sociology Department and Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. Drawing on ethnographic methods, she studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices. Her book, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press, 2020) focuses on the case of web journalism, analyzing the growing importance of audience analytics in web newsrooms in the U.S. and France. With the Social Media Collective, Angèle will work on a new research project on the paradoxes of algorithmic labor through an ethnographic study of influencers and influencer marketing firms on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Our best wishes to our most recent faculty visitor Desmond Patton, who has returned to Columbia University’s School of Social Work, and Elena Maris, who just completed her SMC postdoc and is now an assistant faculty in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago!
In a new op-ed, published yesterday in The Hill, Mary L. Gray and her co-authors argue for the importance of human labor behind contact tracing and argue for a more human-centered approach in current tech strategies.
As the Center for Disease Control (CDC) plans to massively scale up testing and contact-tracing for COVID-19, Gray argues cell phone location data for digital contact tracing is only a partial solution. “Successful contact tracing involves patiently helping people recall with whom they have interacted in the preceding weeks and assessing the risk associated with each of these interactions,” they argue. “Irrelevant contact data will needlessly consume precious human contact tracer time.”
Successful contact tracing programs rely on deeply human exchanges. It requires trust between the human contact tracers and those who have been exposed to life-threatening diseases. Technology can help in important ways—dynamic reference tools, secure databases, and centralized data storage— but ultimately, the best technological interventions to fight COVID-19 will be those designed with collaboration and equity in mind. Technological solutions must help the human contact tracers with the difficult work of building human connection and trust in our public health systems.
Mary Gray’s co-authors include Barbara Grosz, Higgins Research Professor of Natural Sciences in the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and Margaret Bourdeaux, MD, MPH, the policy liaison for Partners in Health COVID-19 Contact Tracing Program. She holds appointments at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Many of our colleagues in academia have had to very quickly migrate their teaching online, in response to changes made by their universities in addressing the coronavirus. This can be so much work – our hats off to everyone who has done so gracefully and ingeniously. An online course can be a lot of hours to fill, a lot of Zoom meetings, so many unmuted mics. There’s nothing better than a video to provide that welcome relief of a guest lecture. But finding them can eat up a lot of prep time too: scrounging through so much available material online, skimming through long videos to see if they’re right for your course.
And, many graduate students in our field are finding their research disrupted – unable to gather data, or unable to write with kids at home, or just thrown by the world. Sometimes it’s easier to just power through a book you meant to read – but that takes hours. Isn’t a good book talk almost as good, and so much faster?
We thought we’d do a little of the scrounging and skimming for you. Below are some of the lectures, interviews, and podcasts from the researchers and the postdocs (past and present) from the Social Media Collective, that we thought could be most easily dropped into a new media syllabus. If one works, may it speed your prep time and more quickly get you to your bed or your binge watching. If one lines up with your work, we hope it provides an easily digestible task in these days of stress and distraction.
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Nancy Baym, “New Media, New Work, and the New Call to Intimacy” (2018, Rutgers University, 78 min – Q&A starts at 60) — overview of Playing to the Crowd
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Nancy Baym, “Personal Connections in the Digital Age” (2016, Microsoft Research, 56 min – Q&A starts at 50) — overview of Personal Connections in the Digital Age
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Nancy Baym, “Connecting with Audiences: Musicians and Social Media” (2012, Summer Social Webshop, 53 min – Q&A starts at 50) — on research coding methods
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Mary Gray, “Ghost Work – Discussion with the Author” (2019, TechEquity Collaborative, 74 min – Q&A starts at 53) — overview of Ghost Work
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Mary Gray, “‘There are no gay people here’: Expanding the boundaries of queer youth visibility in the rural United States” (2012, UNC, 60 min) — overview of Out in the Country
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Mary Gray, Communicators (2014, C-SPAN, 29 min) — on data ethics
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Tarleton Gillespie, “Custodians of the Internet” (2018, MIT, 16 min) — overview of Custodians of the Internet
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Tarleton Gillespie, “Custodians of the Internet” (2018, UVA, 69 min – Q&A starts at 53) — overview of Custodians of the Internet
Jessa Lingel, “An Internet for the People: The Politics and Promise of Craigslist” (2020, Princeton University Press, 3 min)
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Megan Finn, “We Are All Well: A Social History of Public Information Infrastructures After Disasters” (2019, University of Washington, 77 min – Q&A starts at 49)
Lana Swartz, “Talking Blockchain” (2019, Filene Fill-in, 27 min)
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Lana Swartz, “Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff” (2017, MIT, 19 min)
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Lana Swartz, “Cashless Society: Can We Get Rid of Cash? (2019, University of Virginia, 1 min)
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Dan Greene, “Not Bugs, But Features: Hopeful Institutions and Technologies of Inequality” (2017, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, 70 min – Q&A starts at 35)
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Dan Greene, “Organizing the Library and Its Contradictions” (2018, Metropolitan New York Library Council, 42 min – Q&A starts at 36)
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Dylan Mulvin, “Embedded Dangers: Revisiting the Y2K Problem and the Politics of Technological Repair” (2017, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, 56 min – Q&A starts at 28)
We’re thrilled that Desmond Patton, associate professor in the School of Social Work at Columbia University, is visiting us for the first half of 2020. He’s a rare bird in our field, able both to explain the importance of cultural contexts in data science techniques to technical experts, and to do the important ethnographic work necessary to take account of those contexts. His research “uses qualitative and computational data collection methods to examine the relationship between youth and gang violence and social media; how and why violence, grief, and identity are expressed on social media; and the real-world impact these expressions have on well-being for low-income youth of color.”
By way of getting to know his work, if you’re in the Boston/Cambridge area, you have an excellent opportunity to hear him speak tomorrow (Thurs Feb 20, 5-6:30pm) as pat of the MIT Comparative Media Studies / Writing colloquium series. Beyond that, we wanted to share two new papers from him and his colleagues that may be of interest. The first describes a collaborative, critical methodology for extracting context in social media posts for natural language processing tasks. The second paper describes a new web-based annotation system (VATAS) designed to help social workers and social scientists conduct social media analysis.
Five case studies from global and mid-sized cities around the world illustrate the concept of “re-placeing” by showing how different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation practices, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to re-produce abstract urban spaces as inhabited places with deep meanings and emotional attachments.
“Maybe it’s not that the nature of place is changing, but what place means now within the digital era is changing… Part of the way that it’s changing is because place is not necessarily about static pause, or even an exact location, but it’s more of an event. It’s more of a performance. So place itself is becoming a little bit more mutable, more changeable, more fluid in the sense that its meaning is becoming more changeable, mutable and fluid through the use of digital technologies.”
Halegoua argues that a sense of place is integral to understanding contemporary relationships with digital media while highlighting our own awareness of the places where we find ourselves and where our technologies find and place us. This book expands practical and theoretical understandings of how urban planners envision and plan connected cities, the role of urban communities in shaping and interpreting digital architectures, and the tales of the city produced through mobile and web-based platforms. Digital connectivity is reshaping the city as well as the ways we navigate through it and belong within it. How this happens and the types of places we produce within these networked environments is what this book addresses.
Join us in congratulating Senior Principal Researcher and Social Media Collective member Mary Gray, for two achievements this week!
Yesterday, the Digital Future Society released a report this week called “The Future of Work in the Digital Era: The Rise of Labour Platforms.” Mary co-authored the report with the other members of the Equitable Growth working group (https://digitalfuturesociety.com/equitable-growth/): ten international experts in platform work, worker-led movements, and the future of work. The report examines both the opportunities and challenges faced by workers doing platform work, and proposes five policy initiatives to address these key challenges:
Amplify the Atypical Worker’s Voice, to ensure legal status to third-party entities authorized to represent platform workers in collective agreements between platforms and governments
DataWorks! to mandate regular publishing of data by platforms of average income earned and time spent on the platform, making the data available to workers, monitoring agencies, and data activists
Platform Cooperative Accelerator, a government-run and -funded accelerator to cultivate and develop platform cooperatives, encouraging fair wages for workers and high quality services for customers
Worker Status Questionnaire, to help workers determine whether they are an employee or self-employed—which can better inform workers and platforms of the worker’s employment status, rights, and obligations
Easy Taxes for Platform Workers, to facilitate payments of income taxes and social security contributions for platform workers who are often considered independent workers
The entire report, which includes detailed descriptions of each initiative, can be found here.
And today, Mary is speaking at the California Future of Work Commission as a featured expert. The event is being livestreamed on YouTube. In August 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order establishing a commission to understand the current state of jobs for Californians, analyze the way technologies and other factors have shaped these conditions, and recommend how to improve jobs and work for Californians in the future. Mary is part of the Jan 16 convening, focused on “Employment and Labor Law in the New Economy.” More information about the commission is available on the California Governor’s website.
The Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England (MSRNE) is looking for a social media postdoctoral researcher (anticipated start date: July 2020). This position is an ideal opportunity for a scholar whose work draws on communication, media studies, anthropology, sociology, and/or science and technology studies to bring empirical and critical perspectives to complex socio-technical issues. We also consider applications from candidates who might bridge SMC and one or more areas of the MSRNE lab, including machine learning, economics, bioinformatics, cryptography, algorithmic game theory.
The Social Media Collective is comprised of full-time researchers, postdocs, visiting faculty, Ph.D. interns, and research assistants. Current projects in New England include:
– how do social media platforms, digital assistants, and related technologies challenge and reshape our relationships? (Nancy Baym)
– how do social media platforms, through algorithmic design and content policies, serve as custodians of public discourse? (Tarleton Gillespie)
– what are the cultural, political, and economic implications of crowdsourcing as a new form of semi-automated, globally-distributed digital labor? (Mary L. Gray)
– how do media/tech industries and users try to know and influence each other? What are the roles of technology and identity in these interactions? (Elena Maris)
SMC postdocs may have the opportunity to visit and collaborate with our sister Social Media Collective members in New York City.
Microsoft Research provides a vibrant multidisciplinary research environment, with an open publications policy and close links to top academic institutions around the world. Postdoctoral researcher positions offer emerging scholars an opportunity to develop their research career and to interact with some of the top minds in the research community.
Postdoctoral researchers receive a competitive salary and benefits package, and are eligible for relocation expenses. Postdoctoral researchers are hired for a two-year term appointment following the academic calendar, starting in July 2020.
Qualifications
Applicants should have a strong academic record in anthropology, communication, media studies, sociology, science and technology studies, or a related field. The ideal candidate may be trained in any number of disciplines, but should have strong social scientific or humanistic methodological, analytical, and theoretical foundations, be interested in questions related to technology or the internet and society or culture, and be interested in working in a highly interdisciplinary environment that includes computer scientists, mathematicians, and economists.
Applicants must have completed the requirements for a PhD, including submission of their dissertation, prior to joining Microsoft Research. We encourage those with tenure-track job offers from other institutions to apply, so long as they can defer their start date to accept our position.
Successful candidates will have a well-established research track record as demonstrated by journal publications and conference papers, as well as participation on program committees, editorial boards, and advisory panels.
Responsibilities
Postdoctoral researchers define their own research agenda. In addition to their own research, postdocs are expected to be a contributing participant in the SMC and the MSRNE lab.
Application process
Submit an online application here. Click “Apply now” The site may prompt you to set up an account first; be patient.
The application will ask you to upload your complete CV and the names of three referees (one of you letter writers should be your dissertation advisor).
In addition, you must upload the following 3 attachments with your online application:
1. a single research statement (four page maximum length) that does the following:
outlines the questions and methodologies central to your research agenda (~ two pages);
offers a description of how your research agenda relates to research conducted by the Social Media Collective (~ one page);
provides an abstract and chapter outline of your dissertation (~ one page)
2. two writing samples: journal articles, book chapters, or equivalent (uploaded as two separate attachments);
After you submit your application, a request for a recommendation letter will be automatically sent to your list of referees on your behalf. NOTE: THE APPLICATION SYSTEM WILL NOT REQUEST REFERENCE LETTERS UNTIL AFTER YOU HAVE SUBMITTED YOUR APPLICATION! Please warn your letter writers in advance so they will be ready to submit them as soon as they receive the prompt. The email they receive will tell them they have two weeks to respond, but consideration of application begins very quickly after the December 1 deadline – so submitting early will give them adequate time to get their letters to us. Please make sure to check back with your referees to ensure they received the request for letters of recommendation and that they sent them. You can check the progress on individual reference requests at any time by clicking the “status” tab within your application page.
To be assured of full consideration, all of your materials need to be received by December 1, 2019. If you have any questions about the application process, you can contact Tarleton Gillespie at tarleton@microsoft.com – please include “SMC postdoc” in the subject line.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.
If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.
