Jason Oakes is a sociologist and historian of science interested in the organization of work, the sociology of knowledge, the history of the human sciences, and the philosophy of modeling among other things. Philosophically he is a follower of Pragmatists like John Dewey and Hasok Chang. He uses a historical and comparative approach to study complex problems.

His previous work was on the history of Cold War models of growth and resource constraints in biology and economics, particularly as instantiated by Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb.

Currently, Jason collaborates with philosophers and social scientists at the UC Davis program in science and technology studies and the Tremont Research Institute in San Francisco. He also consulted on projects working on the social studies of algorithms, medical billing software, medical device interoperability, and the solidarity economy.