Writing and speaking

Crawford has a PhD from the University of Sydney.^[22] In 2006, her book based on her doctoral dissertation,^{[citation needed]} Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood, won the individual category of the Manning Clark National Cultural Award,^[23]and in 2008 she received the Max Crawford Medal for outstanding scholarship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities.^[24]

Crawford has spoken and published academic papers on such topics as social media,^{[25][26][27][28]}mass media regulation,^[29] gender and mobile phones,^[30] young people and sexting,^[31] and big data.^[32] She has given keynote addresses at venues such as the 2013 O'Reilly Strata Conference^[33] and the 2013 DataEDGE conference hosted by the UC Berkeley School of Information.^[34][35] She co-authored a book with Chris Chesher and Anne Dunn titled Understanding the Internet: Language, Technology, Media, and Power in 2014.^{[36][non-primary source needed]}

She published a book called Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence through Yale University Press in 2021.^[37][38] Her article "Artificial Intelligence Is Misreading Human Emotion" was shortlisted for The Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing in 2022.^[39]

Crawford was an inaugural Cybernetic Imagination Resident from 2022-2023 and spoke at the launch of the program.^[40] She completed a collaborative research-art project, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500, with Vladan Joler in this time.^[41]

Art projects

Anatomy of an AI System is a large-scale map and essay that is intended to reveal the material, human, and ecological costs of the Amazon Echo. It was created in collaboration with artist Vladan Joler and won the Beazley Design of the Year Award in 2019. It is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.^[1][42]

In collaboration with artist and photographer Trevor Paglen, Training Humans is composed of images used to train AI systems which were exhibited at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2019. This was intended to show that AI systems are subject to algorithmic bias, can reflect existing systems of power, and may reinforce inequality.^[2][43] The exhibition was criticized for making use of facial images without informed consent.^[44][45][46]

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500 is a large-scale visualization that maps the co-evolution of technological and societal systems, created in collaboration with artist Vladan Joler.^[41] In 2024 this work won the European Commission's Grand Prize in Artistic Exploration^[47] and was exhibited at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2025.^[48] In May 2025, Calculating Empires received the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2025.^[49][50]