The UVA Environmental Institute is pleased to announce the newest Practitioner Fellow to join the cohort of Environmental Sustainability and Resilience Practitioner Fellows: Tamara Kneese.
Kneese joins the Institute from her position as senior research scientist at Partnership on AI. Previously, she led the Data & Society Research Institute’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program and Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab. At Data & Society, Kneese was the lead of a National Science Foundation planning grant “Assessing Environmental Impacts of AI Through Participatory Methods,” along with Mar Hicks (School of Data Science) and Jess Reia (School of Data Science and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy) at the University of Virginia.
Kneese joins the University of Virginia for one year, beginning September 2026, to build on the success of the work with Hicks and Reia. The team will also work with Lauren Bridges (Media Studies in the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences), who was recently awarded a Climate Collaborative grant to examine how data center expansion impacts climate resilience, energy systems, water resources, and community well-being.
“The ability to join UVA as a Practitioner Fellow is exciting, particularly at this point of our work,” Kneese said. “Working with professors Jess Reia, Mar Hicks, and Lauren Bridges, we will strengthen relationships between community organizations, policymakers, and technologists in the Charlottesville area as well as members of the UVA community to develop holistic frameworks for evaluating the environmental and social impacts of AI, including data centers.”
During her fellowship, Kneese and the UVA team will host multistakeholder workshops and convenings around the environmental footprint of AI tools and data centers. They will also develop a set of case studies about how data center host communities have negotiated with tech companies and local governments to build a playbook for community engagement.
“AI is quickly changing the environmental landscape in profound ways,” said Karen McGlathery, director of the UVA Environmental Institute. “Universities should be at the forefront of proposing frameworks and community resources that can help all stakeholders make the best decisions to minimize environmental impacts. Kneese and her UVA collaborators are tackling these important issues.”
“This project builds on my recent research, including inaugural pilot studies in Virginia and California,” added Kneese, “to develop fuller national and international analyses of the environmental and social repercussions of data center expansion.”
Kneese received her PhD from New York University and was a professor at the University of San Francisco as well as a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Social Media + Society, Cultural Studies, and Social Text and in popular outlets including Wired, The Verge, and The Baffler.
Kneese is the author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us In This Life and Beyond (Yale University Press, 2023) and co-author (as part of Capacitor Collective) of Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry (Common Notions, 2025).