Research
Current projects
AIdeology
Cultural Models of Language in Language Models
This project examines how cultural beliefs about language (language ideologies) shape the development, regulation, and social impact of Large Language Models (LLMs). Through ethnographic studies of EU regulation, compliance efforts, and local LLM development, the research aims to understand how AI technologies transform human communication and culture while developing methods that combine ML and linguistic anthropology.
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.
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 with a particular look at the semiotic affordances of technicalness.
On the political techno-science of world-makingThis 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
