Stefana Broadbent
Stefana Broadbent is a visiting researcher at the Department of Anthropology at UCL. Between 2004 and 2008 she was responsible for the development of the User Observatory at Swisscom. The Observatory runs ethnographic studies on the evolution of users? practices with information and communication technologies in Switzerland. Previously, she was in the Management Team of IconMedialab a multinational digital consultancy listed in Stockholm and was in charge of the hu-man computer interaction competence. In 1993 she founded CB&J, a company specialized in hu-man factors and user research that was acquired by IconMedialab in 1999.
In the last 15 years of applied research, there have been two main areas of investigation: the evolution of digital activities at home (information, leisure, communication and self expression) and the analysis of complex and highly automated work environments in aviation and process control. All of these projects had in common an ethnographic approach to capture evolving social practices and a design intent to inform and support the conception of new tools and services
Stefana holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive science from the University of Edinburgh, and a degree in Psychology from the Univesité de Genève.
See Dr. Broadbent's TED Talk, "How the Internet Enables Intimacy," delivered in July, 2009 (requires the Adobe Flash Player plug-in), or listen to her speak on the BBC's Forum radio broadcast in August, 2009.
Victor Buchli
Buchli works on architecture, domesticity, the archaeology of the recent past, critical understandings of materiality and new technologies and the anthropology of sustainability and design. He also teaches on the UCL Urban Studies MSc and supervises on the Mphil/PhD programme at the Bartlett and serves on the Board of the Victoria and Albert/Royal College of Art MA History of Design Programme. He has conducted fieldwork in Russia, Britain and more recently in Kazakhstan, where he concluded research based on a neigbourhood ethnography in the new capitol of Astana, Kazakhstan, examining questions of materiality, architecture and urbanism in the post-socialist period. In addition, he is writing a new book Immateriality which examines the significance of material cultures that paradoxically attempt to deny their own physicality and another entitled The Anthropology of Architecture (Berg 2011).
Currently he is starting new research in new materials and new technologies examining the rise of rapid manufacturing or 3-D printing. This research is part of a co-organised ESRC funded intiative entitled New Materials, New Technologies with Susanne Kuechler and Graeme Were in UCL Anthropology and Materials Sciences at Kings College London. In addition, he is a member of the Eco-Town Delivery Consortium: an industry based knowledge transfer initiative examining the development of carbon neutral living through which he is conducting a long term ethnographic project ‘Assembling the Carbon Neutral Subject’ and supervising research into the anthropology of ecologically sustainable development and design. More recently he has begun work as a member of the interdisciplinary Templeton Scholars Group on the origins of domesticity at the Neolithic site of Çatal Höyük in Turkey where he is examining long term culture change and processes of material iteration and innovation.
Ludovic Coupaye
Coupaye focuses on the arts and anthropology of the Pacific, with an emphasis on the groups, material cultures and technologies of Melanesia. His doctoral thesis (SRU/UEA 2005), was titled Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships: Outlining the Technical System of Long Yam Cultivation and Display among the Abelam of Nyamikum Village (East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea). He is currently writing on the magic and social life of ritual objects among the Abelam.
Lane DeNicola
DeNicola has a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and prior to his graduate training worked for six years as a programmer and simulation designer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and finally at the Center for Space Research at MIT. His doctoral research entailed ethnographic work on the training of satellite image interpreters in India, and he is currently researching the use of satellite imagery and other "geomedia" by NGOs and advocacy groups. He is also completing a book under the title The Clickwheel Cargo Cult: Reading the Ipod as a Cultural Artifact.
Susanne Kuechler
Küchler is currently working on a new manuscript, which develops the theoretical implications of her past ethnographic research into the making of sculpture and the cognitive work of images. The Material Mind takes insights into the nature of innovation, won during long-term and collaborative research on the take up and transformation of cloth in the Pacific, to the context of the development of ‘mindware’ in laboratories. The manuscript offers a critical review of the existing theorisation of the aesthetics of the material [Materialästhetik] and sets out a new vision for the study of sculptural art and design, which takes into account the interface between the material and the cognitive as symptomatic of knowledge economies. Geographical: South Pacific; Papua New Guinea, New Ireland; Polynesia, the Cook Islands. And laboratories.
September 2005-July2006: Invited Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin: The library research conducted during the year of residency concerned the evolving technology and fabrics supporting wearable computing and investigated its implications for the theory and methodology of material culture and anthropology. ‘Smart’ clothes and ambient intelligence provoke questions of how notions of mind and of life inform and are informed by prototyping, where it is the functionality of collections of artefacts which supports systemic relations between artefacts, and where a sociality with objects is mediated by such inter-artefactual relations. The initial work on the manuscript also concerned itself with a critique of current work on innovation, directing attention to the need for anthropological research to be conducted on the social history of the prototype in order to develop new methodologies and theories capable of handling emerging futures.
Jerome Lewis
Full profile2011-2012: Developing geographic information systems for non-literate users. ESRI (the leading GIS manufacturers in the world - products include ArcInfo and ArcGIS) have committed $150,000 to bring me to work with their prototype laboratory in California on developing a stand alone GIS application for use by non-literate users - focusing on hunter-gatherers in the Congo Basin involved in ‘extreme’ citizen science.
2011-2012: Monitoring poaching and illegal hunting. Developing mapping software for non-literate hunter-gatherers to identify and map illegal hunting activities. With First Peoples Worldwide, Wildlife Conservation Society, Helveta Ltd. and Congolaise Industriel de Bois. US$20,000
2005- Ongoing: Extreme Citizen Science. Making tools and developing methodologies for scientifically valid data collection to be done by non-literate people. Together with Helveta, a UK firm specialising in traceability and monitoring software, I designed prize-winning icon-driven mapping software for palm-top GPS units to enable non-literate hunter-gatherers to map key resources they want to protect from damage by loggers. The system is now being used in Cameroon, Central African Republic and Nigeria and will soon be used in Gabon. Interest has been expressed for work in Ethiopia and Indonesia.
Daniel Miller
Miller has carried several research projects on the media which have resulted in publications including The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (with D. Slater) Berg: Oxford 2000 and The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (with H Horst) Berg: Oxford 2006, Tales from Facebook Polity 2011, and with Dr. M Madianou of Cambridge University Migration and New Media: transnationalism and polymedia (Routledge Sept 2011). He is currently working on the impact of social networking and webcam on transnational relationships and within Trinidad.
See Prof. Miller's discussion of his just-released Tales from Facebook (on YouTube and Vimeo).
Kathleen Richardson
Richardson’s postdoctoral research will be a study of special kinds of robots for the therapeutic assistance for children and adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). These robots are termed “social” and “humanoid”. Robotic machines and persons with ASD are said to lack social capacities – yet I will follow their interactions in the clinical and lab spaces in the UK and US. Studies have suggested that the mere presence of a humanoid robot can enhance the social capacities of persons with ASD. This presents an interesting issue for anthropological theorizing of the social – what does it mean to be social? Who or what can or cannot be said to have it?
Kathleen's British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship builds on research completed for her PhD in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge where she studied the making of human-like and social robots at MIT. And for the last two years has also conducted research on social networking particularly Facebook.