Akshita Sivakumar is a designer and social scientist. Her work focuses on technoscience at the confluence of environmental governance and social movements to analyze the socio-spatial production of difference in justice-oriented efforts involving the state, market, and civil society. She combines ethnographic and critical-making methods to analyze the politics of representation, knowledge production, labor, and solidarities. Her current research and book project examines how computational technologies mediating environmental governance and environmental justice in California produce material and discursive differences and how social movement actors align with and contest these processes and outcomes.

She received her Ph.D. in Communication and Science Studies at UC San Diego, completing her dissertation “Model Governance, Model Justice: Social Infrastructures in Urban Environments.” This work was supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDRIG). She trained in architecture at Washington University in St. Louis and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has practiced as an architectural designer. 

She maintains a creative practice under the moniker of moredustings and leads a lab at UC Davis called the Collective for Socio-spatial and Environmental Praxis (CSEP). CSEP undertakes transdisciplinary and community-led research to address the spatial and political nature of the challenges of governing the built environment.