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Anna Weichselbraun

  • About me
  • Research
  • Writing
  • Teaching
  • CV
  • …  
    • About me
    • Research
    • Writing
    • Teaching
    • CV

    Anna Weichselbraun

    • About me
    • Research
    • Writing
    • Teaching
    • CV
    • …  
      • About me
      • Research
      • Writing
      • Teaching
      • CV
      • About me
      • Research
      • Writing
      • Teaching
      • CV
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        • About me

          anthropologist of nuclear power, expertise, and bureaucracy

          Hello, my name is Anna Weichselbraun ('vaɪ̯ç.səl.bʁaʊ̯n) and I'm an anthropologist of knowledge, technology, and organizations.

           

          My work draws on semiotic analysis to examine how technology, knowledge, and political values combine to form the “common sense” of global technological governance in the Anthropocene. Read this interview with me about my most recent article in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

           

          I am currently a postdoctoral research and teaching associate ("Universitätsassistentin") at the University of Vienna's Department of European Ethnology.

           

          From 2016-2018 I was a Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. I earned my PhD in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in August 2016.

           

          Contact

          anna.weichselbraun[AT]univie.ac.at
          Twitter

          Academia.edu
          ORCID

          CV
        • Research

          Current projects

          IAEA Headquarters

          The Nuclear Order of Things

          Bureaucracy, Objectivity

          & Boredom at the IAEA

          This research provides an intimate view of the practices and activities of nuclear safeguards inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and connects these quotidian practices to the geopolitics of nuclear governance. It investigates the question of the organization's political legitimacy through the capacity for the bureaucracy to produce objective knowledge.

          Governing the Anthropocene

          Technologies of Truth and Trust

          This project explores governing the Anthropocene as a problem of the unknowability of others’ intentions. By taking a follow-the-thing perspective on trust-mediating technologies, this project will situate Blockchain in a longue durée history of technical artifacts and security practices that have similarly sought to solve problems of uncertainty.

          To develop this project, I am participating in the interdisciplinary research group, The State Multiple, with colleagues in history and law at the University of Vienna.

          Down with MS Word!

          Tools of Scholarly Knowledge and Practice

          Together with FOSS software developers and other humanistic scholars interested in improving the research, writing, and collaboration workflows of researchers and academics, we are developing a set of learning materials to assist scholars at all career stages in adopting more sustainable and inter-operative scholarly knowledge practices.
          More to come soon at HYPERUNIVERSITY.

        • Writing

          In-progress

          Book manuscript: The Nuclear Order of Things: Bureaucracy, Objectivity, and Boredom at the IAEA
          This book asks why the task of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons — with their spectacular destructive potential — was entrusted to an international bureaucracy. In answering this question, the book reveals globally held aspirations for bureaucratic organizations to calmly and rationally produce impartial knowledge about the world. Through a historical and ethnographic study of the international control of nuclear technologies ("nuclear safeguards"), with a particular focus on the International Atomic Energy Agency, this book shows the ideological force of these aspirations in the construction of the hierarchical global nuclear order while telling a story of bureaucracy's promises instead of its failures.

          Publications (academic)

          [OPEN ACCESS: most downloaded PoLAR article in 2020!] "From Accountants to Detectives: How Nuclear Safeguards Inspectors Make Knowledge at the IAEA” 2020. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12346

           

          [OPEN ACCESS] "Of Broken Seals and Broken Promises: Attributing Intention at the IAEA." 2019. Cultural Anthropology 34 (4), 503–528. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.4.02

           

          “‘People here speak five languages!’: the reindexicalization of linguistic minorityhood among Carinthian Slovenes in Vienna, Austria.” 2014. Language in Society 43.4: 421–444.

           

          “Language and Law” (with Justin Richland). 2014. In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Ed. John Jackson. New York: Oxford University Press.

          Op-eds, commentaries, blogs

          "Corona Chronotopes." Covid-19, Fieldsights, Society for Cultural Anthropology blog, April 27, 2020.

           

          Not Talking about Disarmament at the IAEA, Anthropology News, July 19, 2018.

           

          Don't assume Trump is more responsible with nuclear weapons than North Korea, The Guardian, July 6, 2017.

           

          “Crisis Talk” in Crisis and Nuclear Scholars’ Responsibility to Imagine, First 100 Days, Harvard STS Blog, April 14, 2017.

          Page 99 for CaMP Dissertations, CaMP: Communication, Media and Performance Anthropology Blog, November 21, 2016.

        • Teaching

          Click here for all my courses at the University of Vienna

          From Atom to Anthropocene

          On the political techno-science of world-making

          This course explores the relationships between modes of thought, knowledge practices and the modes and means of agentive politics that follow from such practices from the perspective of the anthropology of knowledge.

          Download syllabus

          Language and Interaction in Ethnographic Perspective

          Methods in linguistic anthropology

          This seminar introduces students to the methodological and empirical-analytical possibilities for ethnographically studying language and interaction. On the basis of key texts in the literature, we will discuss the various approaches afforded by linguistic anthropology, narrative studies, and related fields. At the same time, this methods seminar will allow students to gather, transcribe, and analyze linguistic-interactional data in a series of exercises, as well as critically reflect the production of transcripts a

          Download syllabus

          Chronotopes

          The social and cultural dimensions of timespace

          This graduate seminar examines Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope and its uses and utility in the cultural and social sciences.

          Download syllabus

          Language and Culture

          On the role of language in reflecting and producing social relationships

          That language shapes culture is a commonplace understanding. But where does it come from and why does it appear so obvious? In this course, we will explore the historical development of the relationship between language and culture.

          Experts

          On the establishment of authoritative knowledge

          This graduate seminar examines expert knowledge as practice, resource, and format. It draws on literature in STS and the anthropology of knowledge to discuss how knowledge, rationality, and authority are socioculturally mediated. Taking the "expert" as an archetypical figure of 20th century modernity, we interrogate the materialization and embodiment of knowledge.

          Ethnographic research in archives

          Historical methods

          This upper-level and graduate seminar conducts a historical survey of the structuring relationship between complex organizational forms and the order of social and political life. It examines the role of governance, the figure of the expert, and the function of files for communication, in order to trace out prevailing imaginaries of knowledge and power as they operate in contemporary culture.

          Forschungsfelder

          In this seminar, students will be introduced to the main research topics and approaches in European Ethnology.

          Introduction to Anthropological Theory

          The development of social & cultural systems

          This course serves as an introduction to anthropological thought and theory to undergraduate students. Tracing the discipline from its problematic beginnings as colonial knowledge making enterprise up to the most recent "ontological" turn, the course examines the directions and disruptions that have shaped the way we understand anthropology today.

          Download syllabus

          Anthropology of Knowledge

          The atomic age

          This course introduces students to the anthropology of knowledge through the cultural, political, and scientific dimensions of the "atomic age." By reading primary source texts alongside critical ethnographic and historical works engaging various aspects of the nuclear age (including nuclear weapons strategy, studies of radiation in the environment, civil defense culture, nuclear accidents, nuclear law, and long term nuclear waste storage), we map out 20th century knowledge production across science, governance, and the environment.

          Download syllabus

          Bureaucracies and Power

          On the role of organizational forms in the establishment of social and political order

          This upper-level and graduate seminar conducts a historical survey of the structuring relationship between complex organizational forms and the order of social and political life. It examines the role of governance, the figure of the expert, and the function of files for communication, in order to trace out prevailing imaginaries of knowledge and power as they operate in contemporary culture.

          Download syllabus
        • Curriculum Vitae

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