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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

        anthropologist of knowledge, technology, and governance

        Hello, my name is Anna Weichselbraun ('vaɪ̯ç.səl.bʁaʊ̯n) and I'm an anthropologist who studies the governance of technologies as well as technologies of governance.

         

        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.

         

        From August 2022 to May 2023 I will be a Berggruen Fellow at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, CA.

         

        During that time I will be on leave from my position as 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.

        Governance Artifacts

        Technologies of Truth and Trust

        This project explores governance 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 a sometime contributor to the interdisciplinary research collective The Metagovernance Project. Check out this analysis and tooling kit for DAO constitutions to which I contributed linguistic and discursive analysis.

        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 and Talking

        Under review

        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)

        Forthcoming 2023: "Atomic Destruction" in Handbook of the Anthropocene, eds. Nathanaël Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf, Springer Nature. PREPRINT.

         

        Forthcoming 2023: "Wort für Wort: Bedingungen der Analyse diplomatischer Wortprotokolle als historische Quellen" in Das Protokoll, eds. Peter Plener, Niels
        Werber and Burkhardt Wolf, J.B. Metzler.

         

        “In Code We Trust: On the Semiotics of Blockchain” Kuckuck: Notizen zur Alltagskultur, Vol. 36. Special Issue: CODE (1/2021): 62–65.

         

        [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

        Op-eds, commentaries, blogs

        “Chronotopos Corona.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, LXXV.1: 81-85, 2021.

         

        "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.

        Talks

        VIDEO: "Technologies of Trust: Experiments in Web3 Governance," Research Seminar at CISAC Stanford. Feb 14, 2023.

         

        "What's Governing Web3?" USC Berggruen Fellows Lecture Series, Feb 1, 2023.

      • 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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