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Hi, Iâm Janna! I'm a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of California â Berkeley. My research bridges economic sociology, organizational behavior, and science and technology studies. I employ qualitative and computational methods to examine how market devices and regulatory institutions interact to produce organizational change. My work has been published in Social Forces, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and Technology in Society.
My dissertation research investigates the emergence, adoption, and contestation of climate reporting practices within corporate climate governance, with particular interest in how reporting frameworks demarcate authority on what counts as "sustainable" that shape subsequent organizational action on sustainability. By illuminating how the institutional, political, and technical dimensions of knowledge production shape pathways for organizational action, this work contributes to scholarship on organizational change, the sociology of quantification, and the political economy of climate change. Combining interviews, participant observation, policy analysis, and quantitative data, I investigate how organizations produce and attach meaning to these metrics and the broader implications of finance's role in efforts toward sustainable transition. I first detail how NGOs and the financial sector developed and consolidated voluntary corporate climate disclosure practices before its eventual uptake by securities regulators that increasingly narrowed climate action around risk. I further examine how sustainability professionals within complying companies navigate their organizations to collect, produce, and interpret the required climate metrics, and how these metrics in turn shape organizational routines around sustainability. Finally, I examine the systemic revision of corporate reported emissions data, surfacing the persistent measurement challenges that complicate efforts to link disclosure-based accountability to decarbonization goals.
I am particularly interested in unpacking how climate politics necessarily includes the politics of data collection to measure and benchmark climate accountability. I see applications of my research to many facets of organizational processes that bridge technology and climate, such as emissions markets, supply chain reporting, sustainable finance, and data center infrastructure.
Other ongoing projects include investigating the social and environmental impacts of data center infrastructure (with Armando Lara-Millan); the construction of financialized nature indicators (with Viet Phan); hiring for sustainability skills in corporations (with Adair Morse and Katherine Baird); the âplatformizationâ of climate governance; and comparative studies on organizational pathways for sustainability and responsible AI (with Angèle Christin and Sanna Ali).
My work has been supported by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, the Hewlett Foundation, the American Sociological Association, and the Center for Advanced Internet Studies. I have been recognized with paper awards from the American Sociological Association. Prior to graduate school, I earned a B.S. in Computer Science with honors in Science, Technology, and Society, and an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University, where I was also the winner of the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research.
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