Megan Wiessner is a postdoctoral research fellow at UVA's Digital Technology for Democracy Lab. She studies how digital media reshape industrial landscapes and labor practices, advancing a synthesis of work on sustainability in media studies with scholarship and activism on tech, labor, and equity. 

Before joining the Lab, she completed a PhD in media, culture, and communication at New York University, where her doctoral work focused on the role of digital technology in the growing mass timber industry in the Pacific Northwest. The project documents how the digitalization of architecture and construction has reshaped the very idea of sustainability, facilitating the unlikely reinvention of a legacy resource industry as both high-tech and climate-friendly and incentivizing new forms of prefabricated and modular construction. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the project outlines this new industry’s implications for forests, affordable housing, and workers across the supply chain. 

During her postdoctoral fellowship with the Lab, she is developing a book manuscript based on this research and is continuing to work on several collaborative projects related to the environmental impacts of digital media infrastructures and the sociopolitical implications of relying on digital technologies to manage industrial sustainability.