Karen Mossberger

Karen Mossberger is Professor Emerita in the School of Public Affairs in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions at Arizona State University. She is Director Emerita of the Center on Technology, Data and Society and also a senior sustainability scholar with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. She formerly held the Frank and June Sackton Chair in the School of Public Affairs.  Her research interests include local governance, urban policy, digital inequality, evaluation of broadband programs and digital government. 

She is author/editor of 7 books, including "Choosing the Future: Technology and Opportunity in Communities" (Oxford University Press 2021, with C. Tolbert and S. LaCombe), which won the 2022 Goldsmith Prize for Best Academic Book from the Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The book demonstrates with nearly two decades of data the impact that widespread, inclusive broadband use has for community prosperity.  She is also a co-editor for "Transforming Everything?  Evaluating Broadband's Impacts Across Policy Areas" (Oxford University Press 2021, with Eric Welch and Yonghong Wu). 

Other books on technology, inequality, and public policy include "Digital Cities: The Internet and the Geography of Opportunity" (Oxford University Press 2012, with C. Tolbert and W. Franko), "Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society and Participation" (Mossberger, Tolbert and McNeal 2008, MIT Press), and "Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide" (Mossberger, Tolbert and Stansbury 2003, Georgetown University Press), She is also a co-editor of the "Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics" (2012 with S. Clarke and P. John) and author of "The Politics of Ideas and the Spread of Enterprise Zones" (2000, Georgetown University Press).

In 2023, she received the NASPAA/ASPA Research Award from the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration and the American Society for Public Administration. She was also honored with the ASU Founder's Day Award for Faculty Research in 2023.  Her research on “Race, Place, and Information Technology” won the best paper award for the Public Policy Section of the American Political Science Association in 2005, and "The Effects of E-Government on Trust and Confidence in Government" was chosen as one of the 75 most influential articles in the first 75 years of Public Administration Review. In 2018, she received the Donald C. Stone Scholar award from the American Society for Public Administration's Section on Intergovernmental Administration and Management (SIAM). In 2019 she was selected by UK nonprofit Apolitical as one of the World's 100 Most Influential People in Digital Government - a list including practitioners and academics. 

Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Chicago Community Trust, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, among others. She has served as president of the American Political Science Association's Urban Politics section and Information and Technology Politics section, chair of the International Political Science Association's research committee on Electronic Democracy and was elected a fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration in 2016.