Rachel Plotnick
Associate Professor
Contact Information
Research and Creative Interests
- Human-Machine Relationships
- Interfaces
- Touch/Haptics
- Embodiment
- Media and Materiality
- History of Technology
- Wearables
- design culture and history
- artificial intelligence
Biography
My research and teaching focus on information, communication, and media technologies from an historical and critical/cultural perspective. Specifically, my research agenda examines how technologies participate in practices and experiences of everyday life – with a special interest in interfaces (like buttons, keys, and screens), wearables, and body-technology relationships.
License to Spill: Where Dry Devices Meet Liquid Lives, my latest book, studies the messiness of media technologies, interrogating how wetness from sweat and smudges to coffee spills and toilet dunks affects our devices. It is forthcoming with The MIT Press on April 29, 2025. Additionally, my first book, Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic and the Politics of Pushing is published by The MIT Press (2018). Read an excerpt here or check out press where my research has been featured, such as in The Wall Street Journal, The Verge Science, The BBC, and Science Friday.
You can also find my work in Technology and Culture, New Media and Society, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Media, Culture and Society and others.
In addition to these efforts, I am part of IU’s Arts & Humanities AI + Digital Futures team, where I’m conducting research on passive wrist wearables from barcoded hospital bracelets to theme park and concert wristbands, thinking both historically and contemporaneously about the rise of “braceleting” as a sociocultural and technical phenomenon.
I am proud to have received an IU Trustees Teaching Award and typically offer classes on digital media and society, social media cultures, wearables, and cultural history of media technologies.