I am a cultural anthropologist whose research is focused on the social, material, and political life of information and information technology. My current work examines technological infrastructures (like data centers, fiber-optic cables, and sonar surveillance networks) as a lens on questions of sovereignty, emerging spatial politics, and enduring formations of imperial power – especially in Iceland and the broader Arctic.
My book manuscript in-progress, Data Fixation: Infrastructure and Industry Where the Cloud Touches Ground, offers an ethnographic inquiry into the relationship between data and place. While digital data is often imagined as ephemeral and immaterial, what we call “the cloud” is comprised of infrastructures and industries, unevenly distributed around the world. Following the rise of the data storage industry in Iceland, the book shows how our “fixations” with data inform the ways in which our data gets “fixed”; in tracing the resulting concentrations and displacements, it unsettles techno-utopian ideals of connectivity. Data Fixation was selected in 2020 for the Atelier Series at the University of California Press.
I am currently accepting graduate students with research interests in technology and infrastructure as they relate to place, power, and politics.