Anthropologist of Medicine and Technology
From Norbert Wiener’s hearing glove, to Clynes and Kline’s metabolically extended mouse, to cyborgs in science fiction, cyborgs figure centrally in speculating about how humans will transcend their bodies and the planet Earth for new frontiers of place, function, and sensation. This post is adapted from a talk given at the Transpecies Society in Barcelona, Spain in January 2019.
In the spring 2019 semester, I am teaching my fourth introduction to STS class at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Read on for the reading list and assignment descriptions.
On December 5, 2018, I gave a webinar on Cyborg Anthropology via EPIC, the leading professional organization for practicing anthropologists. Video of the webinar is archived and available to EPIC members.
The temptation of transcendence through technology pervades digital life. But there are risks that come with seeking to exceed the embodied self through data. Clouds of data become the means by which we can be controlled.
On October 20, 2018, I led a panel discussion at the All Tech Is Human ethical tech summit in New York. We discussed why access to technology should be considered part of tech ethics and how not all forms of “access” are equally inclusive and socially beneficial.
This guide is intended as a resource for students and others interested in current research and controversies on emerging digital technologies, ethics, and society. I compiled it for my Fall 2018 classes to assist students in researching and writing their final papers.
We are moving into a world in which artificial intelligence and machine learning are shaping the spaces we engage with and through and changing our prosthetic capabilities. What does this mean for ethnographic praxis?
In the fall 2018 semester, I am teaching a semester-long class on Cyborgs and Cybernetics at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. You can find the reading list in this post.
This year’s American Anthropology Association(AAA) theme is Resistance, Resilience, Adaptation. The Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology brings Wakanda University to the AAA as an embodiment of all three of these principles. Wakanda University at the AAA will be an ethnofuture space beyond whiteness that challenges anthropology from the ground up.
I teamed up with Jump Into the Light VR cinema and playlab to lead a workshop on Principles of User Research for VR and AR on May 15, 2018. You can catch up on key insights and reflections from the workshop here.
What does it take to build an infrastructural system? What kind of norms do infrastructures enforce, and what kinds of people do they allow to thrive? What kinds of worlds do they make possible? This year we’ll focus on the politics and possibilities of digital infrastructures. Starts Tuesday, June 5th in NYC.
This workshop, offered through my research group Implosion Labs in Brooklyn, NY, provides a deep dive into cyborg theory and cyborg anthropology. The workshop will explore how a cyborg anthropology approach uniquely combines grounded research on the realities of human-technology interactions with an openness to speculation and imagination.
This talk offered a brief exploration of two contemporary food subcultures – that of instagram celebrities and that of the food allergy community. As technology-driven proposals about the future of food proliferate, the issue of what social forms they may reproduce should be problematized in innovation, research, and public discourse.
Drag in the Digital Age is the first meet up of the QX Meetup group.
We’re meeting on Wednesday, May 16, 2018 from 7-9pm at Thoughtworks NYC (99 Madison Avenue, New York, NY). RSVP and more details through the event Meetup page.
Design is increasingly a dominant idiom for creation, innovation, research, and critique. But what makes a “good” design? Why do some designs draw public ire and mockery, while others go unnoticed or are embraced? The answers to these question are not just about the practice of design, but also our ethical commitments to common social goods.
On March 30, 2018, I led the workshop How Like a Cyborg: Rethinking the Agency of Users and Things in Innovation at the Social Innovation, Social Justice: Rethinking Design Anthropology symposium at the University of Cincinnati.
My recent talk at Nerd Nite NYC is now available to watch online!
From designer babies to genetic surveillance, and from the “culture” of tech workplaces to the politics of climate change, feminist science studies writers are at the forefront of research on some of the most pressing issues in science and technology today. This course will delve into some of the apparent dilemmas that modern communities face through engagement with key works from more than thirty years of feminist science studies.
In a lecture given at the Collège de France in 1976, Michel Foucault declared, “One of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power’s hold over life.” This observation is the basis of biopower, a theory of politics that has since spread to many corners of contemporary social thought.
How did computing technologies come to structure our everyday practices and political sensibilities in such profound ways?
