Hannah Pullen-Blasnik

Ph.D. candidate and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Columbia University

Hannah Pullen-Blasnik is a Ph.D. student and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. She is also a Graduate Research Fellow at the Columbia Justice Lab on the Pennsylvania Solitary Study and the Rikers Island Longitudinal Study. Her primary research interests include social movements, political economy, and algorithms and technology.

Hannah is the coordinator for the Racial Capitalism Working Group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, in charge of organizing workshops, roundtables, and events for interdisciplinary collaboration rooted in a commitment to Black radicalism, historical materialism, feminism, and anti-imperialism. She is also co-coordinator for the Sociology of Algorithms Workshop at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy and volunteers with Data for Black Lives as project manager for a research team on algorithmic and technological surveillance.

Hannah is currently developing projects on the appropriation of Black Lives Matter by nonprofits and corporations during Covid-19, and transformations in the ideological state space of Black liberation organizing over the past 50 years. She is also working on research projects that aim to make algorithmic tools more transparent and build community control over their consequences. One such project investigates the biases and impact of prison intake risk assessment scores on incarceration, solitary confinement, and parole decisions. Another examines human decision-making and interpretation of algorithmic results in probabilistic DNA profiling.

Working Group Affiliation

Racial Capitalism, Graduate Assistant