Sarah A. Outland, PhD
Director of Research & Evaluation
Sarah Outland is a first generation college student who grew up in a farm town in the Midwest. She spent her summers after college as a volunteer camp counselor for Girls Rock! Chicago, a music-focused camp for girls, trans, and gender nonconforming kids. This led her to graduate work in sociology. A fan of punk music, Sarah initially looked at a bounded ecosystem of punk rockers to better understand why individuals maintain punk identities and why they move on, and how this differs by gender. From here Sarah moved into studying tech equity amongst high school students for her dissertation work (PhD, UChicago 2020), looking at how kids learn to display work discipline through their devices, how inequalities in access and technological know-how impact their daily functioning, and how kids subvert school surveillance and come up with their own versions of disciplining adults. She lives in Chicago with her dog, Bacon, and her partner, Jack. Sarah was formerly the Research Director at Gender Equality in Tech (GET) Cities, a national initiative designed to accelerate the representation and leadership of women, trans, and nonbinary people in tech.