Sara Schoonmaker

In her research, Sara Schoonmaker explores how digital technologies shape the dynamics of global capitalism and strategies to create alternatives to it. She has published three books and multiple articles about prospects for empowering communities and multiple forms of resistance. Her latest book is Technological Sovereignty: Resisting Racial and Informational Capitalism. She develops a theoretical perspective to grasp the connections between racial and informational capitalism and their effects on struggles to create alternative forms of organizing digital technologies. She calls these alternatives technological sovereignty, illuminating the distinct tensions and possibilities for such alternatives in the cases of COVID-19 vaccines, the internet, and personal data. She traces these struggles from efforts by states from the global South to create a New International Economic Order in the 1970s, to India and South Africa's leadership of the fight for vaccine equity by seeking a waiver on intellectual property rights over COVID-19 vaccines through the World Trade Organization. Neoliberals succeeded in defeating these efforts by developing neoliberal institutions and a proprietary intellectual property regime. In response, however, technological sovereignty strategies offer pathways to resistance through building alternative institutions. These institutions range from a technology transfer hub for vaccine development at the World Health Organization to community and tribal broadband systems that challenge corporate domination of the internet by incumbent internet service providers. In the case of personal data, we can connect with communities of free software and privacy advocates who have created alternative office suites, file sharing and storage systems, email clients, messaging apps, and more.

Schoonmaker taught sociology at University of Redlands from 1995–2023, chairing the department for nine years. She offered courses including Contemporary Social Theory; Consumers and Consumption; Consuming Paris; Economic Justice and Migration in Mexico; Children and Youth; and Sustainable Alternatives to Capitalism. She was involved in the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies and the Latin American Studies Program. Before her time at Redlands, she taught at Colgate University and Hamilton College.

Schoonmaker engages in community activism around immigration and climate justice. She sings in the church choir, plays the piano, works out at the Y, and enjoys time with her friends and family.

• Ph.D., sociology, Boston College, 1990
• B.A., Latin American studies, Earlham College, 1981

Schoonmaker, Sara. Technological Sovereignty: Resisting Racial and Informational Capitalism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2027.

Schoonmaker, Sara. "Navigating Pandemic Crises: Encountering the Digital Commons." American Behavioral Scientist 69, no. 9 (2023): 1075–1091. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642231155360.

Schoonmaker, Sara. Free Software, the Internet, and Global Communities of Resistance. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Schoonmaker, Sara. "Hacking the Global: Constructing Markets and Commons through Free Software." Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 4 (2012): 502–518.

Schoonmaker, Sara. "Software Politics in Brazil: Toward a Political Economy of Digital Inclusion." Information, Communication & Society 12, no. 4 (2009): 548–565.

Schoonmaker, Sara. High-Tech Trade Wars: U.S.-Brazilian Computer Conflicts. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002.