Anthropologist of Medicine and Technology
My book based on my food allergy advocacy research, Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care, is now out from the University of Minnesota Press! You can order it via the press, via online retailers, or request it from your local bookshop.
As unlikely as it may seem, small utopias are all around us.
This essay analyzes how caretaking in a crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic, falls back on cultural ideas of who is most “naturally” fit to care for children.
My latest peer-reviewed, scholarly research article, “Food Allergies and the Hygienic Sublime,” was published in December 2019 in the open-access journal, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. You can read the full article for free.
What do trans women gamers, Jewish journalists, academics of color, and feminist writers have in common? All of them could find themselves targets of coordinated harassment campaigns simply because they have a presence online.
Making babies is not a natural process.
Rather than alleviate risks in a cost-efficient manner, the rush to build new data-driven business models is producing different ones. If health data is capital, the collection of health data is a new form of profit sharing.
Science fiction reveals that the social facts many have taken for granted — things like gender, race, sex, class, hierarchy, and domination that are often attributed to “human nature” — are not inherently true and could be otherwise in the future.
A review of Virginia Eubanks’ book Automating Inequality that asks: What if we thought differently about how to integrate human and machine agencies?
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.
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.
My Commentary article “Conflicting Assumptions: The Meaning of Price in the Pharmaceutical Economy” was published in August 2017 in the journal Science As Culture. An excerpt is below. Reach out for the final version.
My review essay titled “Feminists Write the Anthropocene: Three Tales of Possibility in Late Capitalism,” was published in the Journal of Cultural Economy in August 2017. This essay reviewed three recent books: Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Alexis Shotwell’s Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, and Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.
It is even tempting to regard food allergy as the signature disease of modernity. If so, a return to pure, clean living — avoiding pollution, pesticides, the hustle and bustle of modern life — would seem to be the solution.
How does the financialization of life itself figure as a new means of producing value in modern technoscience? That is the question that motivated Kirk Fiereck to convene the panel “Biofinance: Speculation, Risk, Debt, and Value from Bios” at the 2016 American Anthropological Association meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota last November.
The purity politics of the allergic home is a politics conjured up by the subtleties of material interdependencies between human bodies and the foods they consume to nurture them but fully realized with the help of hoary histories of gendered and racialized work.
This question of the politics of technological artifacts has perhaps never been more salient than now, when we walk around with computing technologies on our person at all times. Chief among these are the politics of becoming cyborg.
The reproduction of gender in food allergic households isn’t about false consciousness. But the priorities of social life at the household level doesn’t scale perfectly onto priorities for gender equality in American society.
How does raising food allergic children reproduce and intensify gendered divisions of labor in the home?
At this point in the development of a new collaborative project, PIP (Practically In Person), I am thinking about how three different ways of assembling people, spaces, time scales, and things are being dynamically constituted: how intersectional identities, artistic and scholarly conceptions of embodiment, and the capitalist political economic context of modern computing technologies are playfully negotiated to imagine and enact a new digital politics for VR.
Danya Glabau 