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Alicia Patterson

Alicia Patterson is a postdoctoral fellow at Ethics Lab, where she is helping to integrate ethics into Georgetown’s computer science curriculum as part of the Responsible Computer Science Challenge grant from the Mozilla Foundation. Patterson works primarily in social and feminist epistemology and her research interacts directly with philosophical questions about stereotypes and privacy. This work has led her to put forward the notion of knowledge entitlement, which is a phenomenon where certain privileged groups or individuals feel entitled to the private information of marginalized groups. 

While at Cornell, Patterson developed her interest and investment in mentorship and teaching. She founded the Mentorship Program at Cornell (a mentoring program for first year graduate students), and the Sage School Editing Group (an informal, community-based program wherein participants share and read each other’s work as a way to foster community and offer guidance to one another). While at Cornell, Patterson taught courses on fake news and media manipulation and information ethics, which investigated questions such as how can we form beliefs in a responsible way when our information landscapes involve more deception and personalization, and how technology can constrain and shape our moral and political lives.

Patterson earned her PhD from Cornell University.

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