Found Connection: Sex Work and the Internet features a panel discussion about how digital technologies have – or haven’t – changed sex work and the lives of sex workers.
Bill of Health
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.
Natural’s Not In It
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.
Automation Otherwise: A Review of Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks
A review of Virginia Eubanks’ book Automating Inequality that asks: What if we thought differently about how to integrate human and machine agencies?
Cyborgs at the Frontiers
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.
Science, Technology, and Society Syllabus
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.
Cyborg Anthropology Webinar @ EPIC
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.
Sins of the Mother
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.
Ethics and Access to Technology
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.
Emerging Technology and Ethics Research Guide – v 1.0
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.
EPIC 2018 Salon: Ethnography and AI
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?
Cyborgs and Cybernetics Syllabus
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.
Wakanda University at AAA 2018
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.
Principles of User Research for VR and AR
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.
The Politics of Infrastructure at BISR Starts June 5
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.
July 12-13: Cyborg Anthropology Workshop
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.
Moon Dust and Rainbows: Food, Health, and the Reproduction of Society
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
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.
#designfail at Nerd Nite NYC
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.
How Like a Cyborg: Rethinking the Agency of Users and Things in Innovation
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.
Danya Glabau 