Esther HsuBorger

Esther HsuBorger is a Principled Innovation Fellow at Arizona State University. In this role, she helps advance university-wide initiatives by listening across roles, units, and communities and mapping the values, ideas, relationships, and resources at stake. Currently, she supports efforts concerned with the public impact of research, place-based and community-engaged approaches, and the ethical dimensions of emerging technologies.

Trained as a sociologist of knowledge and science, Esther asks how institutional structures and cultures shape what counts as knowledge, how knowledge is produced, and who has a say. She has examined these questions in varied domains, most recently through her research on the origins and puzzling persistence of the U.S. federal poverty line. Her work spotlights how institutional definitions—and decisions about whether, how, and when to revise them—rest on judgment calls negotiated over technical, bureaucratic, and political tradeoffs and ultimately over competing visions of the good. She is especially interested in what this means for public trust: Insofar as research and science involve value choices, how can institutions define problems, set priorities, and imagine solutions with—not only for—the publics they serve?

Esther’s work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Institute for Research on Poverty, among others.

Esther also brings experience bridging theory, research, and practice; facilitating intergroup dialogue; and designing experiential learning programs. Earlier in her career, she helped launch academic initiatives and convenings at an international development NGO. 

Esther holds an MS and PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison; a master’s degree in religion, ethics, and politics from Harvard University; and bachelor’s degrees from Arizona State University.