Laura Hand is an Associate Professor at the University of North Dakota. She is in an interdisciplinary position, split between the Political Science & Public Administration department in the Nistler College of Business & Public Administration, and the Population Health department in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences. She teaches in the Master of Public Administration and Master of Public Health programs and serves as the Director of the MPA program. 

Laura’s research is focused on the public encounter: how public employees interact with the people they serve and what is accomplished within those interactions. Her work has examined interpersonal interactions in Arizona’s WIC program, as well as social media interactions on Facebook from local governments and police agencies. Currently, she is focused on broadening her research into technology in the public interest, examining how governments and nonprofit organizations use AI and how these technologies mediate the relationship between organizations, their employees, and the public.

Sandberg, B., Hand, L.C. & Russo, A. (2023). Re-envisioning the Role of “Big Data” in the Nonprofit Sector: A Data Feminist Perspective. Voluntas, 34, 1094–1105.

Hand, L.C & Ching, B.D. (2020). Maintaining neutrality: A sentiment analysis of police agency Facebook pages before and after a fatal officer-involved shooting of a citizen, Government Information Quarterly, 37(1).

Hand, L. C. (2019). A Virtuous Hearer: An Exploration of Epistemic Injustice and an Ethic of Care in Public Encounters. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 43(1), 117–133.

Hand, L.C & Catlaw, T.J. (2019). Accomplishing the Public Encounter: A Case for Ethnomethodology in Public Administration Research, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2(2), 125–137.

• Ph.D. in Public Administration & Policy, 2014, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ
• Master of Public Policy, 2008, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ
• Bachelor of Music, 1994, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA