People

Staff Members

Current Centre Director: Daniel Miller (email)

Haidy Geismar

Haidy Geismar is Professor of Anthropology at University College London where she is also the Curator of the UCL Ethnography Collection and the Inaugural director of the new School for the Creative and Cultural Industries. She has research interests in digital materialities, digital collecting and archiving, intellectual and cultural property, indigenous rights, new forms of cultural representation, the anthropology of art, critical museology and the South Pacific, especially Vanuatu and New Zealand. Recent books include Impermanence: Exploring Continuous Change Across Cultures (with T. Otto and C. Warner, UCL Press 2022), Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age (UCL Press 2018) and Treasured Possessions: Indigenous Interventions into Cultural and Intellectual Property (Duke University Press 2013). Current projects include the mobile memory project (a community sound and digital archive mounted on a cargo bike), the museum of data (with Antonia Walford and Joel Gethin Lewis), and Culture Lab (a new collections and display space for UCL East).

Daniel Miller

Daniel Miller has just completed two ERC five year projects. Why We Post produced twelve volumes including How the World Changed Social Media and The Global Smartphone. These projects have produced twenty volumes which have now passed two million downloads. They are all available as open access with UCL Press. His first book in digital anthropology The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach was published with Don Slater in 2000. Later books include Tales From Facebook, Webcam (with J, Sinanan), Visualising Facebook (with J. Sinanan) Social Media in an English Village, Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland (with P Garvey) and the first edition of Digital Anthropology (with H. Horst). He recently published The Good Enough Life with Polity Press. He has also created a game/quiz with Sheba Mohammid, as part of a health campaign for people in Trinidad, which can be downloaded from any app store as Trini Food Quiz. He has a new grant from the Leverhulme Trust for 2025-8 to study how digital technologies increase capacities for both care and surveillance and how we balance these two in relation to idea of fairness and unfairness. This is a comparison between Shanghai and London and is in collaboration with Xinyuan Wang.

Elena Liber

Elena is an anthropologist interested in themes of memory, storytelling, revolution, hope, and the digital world. She has conducted long term fieldwork in L’viv, Ukraine, and her PhD explored intergenerational memory, storytelling, history and the future using methods such as material culture, oral history and walking to explore how history is present in urban and forested landscapes. She is the co-founder of the TikTok Ethnography Collective. Her current research examines the many ways in which the war in Ukraine is being narrated and documented on and through TikTok, and social media more broadly. Her work on TikTok explores themes of digital storytelling, algorithms, and teaching and learning on TikTok. She is interested in how TikTok is changing our ideas of teaching and learning, and how we tell stories in digital spaces.

Toby Austin Locke

Toby Austin Locke is an anthropologist whose current research focuses on the psychosocial impacts of digital technologies. His first engagements with digital anthropology occurred through his PhD project, Fields of Commoning: attempts and creating (un)common worlds in New Cross, which was a practice-oriented ethnography of a self-organised social centre in London. In this project the development of digital platforms functioned as a participatory research method tracing the processes of collective representation and self-organisation. After completing his PhD at Goldsmiths in 2019 Toby has engaged in research on online conspiracy theory. His current research works across digital and medical anthropology, and focuses on the intersections of ADHD, social media and attention economies. He is also a Lead Researcher in the TikTok Ethnography Collective. Toby joined UCL in 2023 after teaching in anthropology, sociology, psychosocial studies and interdisciplinary research methods at Goldsmiths, Birkbeck, Roehampton and LSBU.

Tone Walford

Dr Tone Walford is a Lecturer in Digital Anthropology. Their research explores the effects of the exponential growth of digital data on social and political imaginaries and practices, with a focus on the natural sciences and environmental politics. They have conducted long-term fieldwork with climate scientists and technicians in the Brazilian Amazon. Their current research explores efforts in international observational science to measure, archive and manage the entire Earth - Big Data Science - looking at issues of data justice, data politics, and data imperialism. They have published articles and chapters on topics such as data power and the politics of informational practices, data aesthetics, and transdisciplinarity. They recently co-edited, with Rachel Douglas-Jones and Nick Seaver, a special issue in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021), and co-edited a volume with Mattering Press, with Cristobal Bonelli, called Environmental Alterities (2020). They teach on the core Digital Anthropology modules, and a module on the Anthropology of Data, with topics ranging across datafied surveillance and the state, data violence, algorithmic economies, digital materialities and datafied personhood.

Yathukulan Yogarajah

 

Yathukulan Yogarajah is a Lecturer in Anthropology of Enterprise at UCL. His doctoral research - Thinking with Uncertainty: Scaling up and down in the cryptocurrency world - explored how cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology was being engaged by startup actors near the Old Street Roundabout (Silicon Roundabout) in London, and speculative online retail traders. He is also the co-founder of the TIkTok Ethnography Collective - a project that works collaboratively with students, lecturers, artists, activists, dance therapists, amongst others, to explore TikTok, social media, and our relation to it. His research interests involve exploring ‘Silicon Cities’, blockchain/emergent technologies, gambling, speculative and divinatory forms of labour, and uncertainty.

Xiaolin Li

Xiaolin Li is an anthropologist working in the fields of gender, sexuality, and digital technologies. Xiaolin’s PhD project, The Menstrual Body Reimagined: Menstruation, Sexuality, and Digital Period-tracking in Urban China, focuses on the making and using of period-tracking (fertility-tracking) apps in the context of a study of menstruation and sexuality in contemporary China. It draws on a two-year ethnographic study of how users of period-tracking apps collect, interpret, and utilise their bodily data, and how the period-tracking company designs period-tracking products in accordance with their ideologies and business strategies. Xiaolin is also interested in the influence of material culture and material objects in shaping body concepts and gender perceptions, focusing on how transgender (Kua Xingbie) individuals in China navigate and experience menstruation through sanitary products. Xiaolin’s most recent paper, Menstruation in a Transitioning Body: The Embodied Experience of Menstruation Among Chinese Kua Xingbie (Cross-Gender) People, published in HAU, explores this theme. Xiaolin’s broader research interests include personalised recommendation algorithms, content moderation, AI and big data, smartphone apps, and social platforms.

Haichao Wang

Haichao Wang is an Associate Lecturer in Anthropology of Enterprise at UCL. Her doctoral research—'Tradition in Transition: Urban Hui Muslim and Digital Dynamics in Contemporary China'—explored how digital technology has significantly transformed Muslim forms of presence and sociality. This thesis reveals an entirely different concept and use of 'tradition' than that expected and articulated in public perceptions, demonstrating that digital technology has been generally employed as a means for retaining Islamic meanings and values. Haichao's other research strand focuses on how digital technology has been used for creative enterprises by Chinese lower-class populations, including low-income women and agricultural workers. Generally, her research interests involve exploring how digital technologies are used and understood to transform contemporary Chinese commercial activity (e.g. WeChat business and live-streaming based on social media) and agriculture (social media and drone used for agricultural production).

Research Fellows

Tanja Ahlin

Tanja Ahlin is an anthropologist and science and technology studies (STS) scholar, primarily interested in (health)care, technologies and aging. Her book Calling Family: Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives is based on ten years of research with Indian families of migrating nurses. The book explores how everyday digital technologies shape what care at a distance is and how people tinker with different kinds of technological devices to do it well. Her current research is on various kinds of animals in elder care, from social robots in the shape of dogs, cats and seals, to therapy animals and even plush toys. Tanja is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam funded through the Research Priority Area Human(e) AI, a member of the AI4 Society Sandbox and a blogger at anthropologyofdata.com. 

Jennifer Cearns

Dr Jennifer Cearns is an anthropologist interested in AI, machine learning, and the uses of data within society. She previously worked alongside Professor Hannah Knox on a project with the Ada Lovelace Institute, exploring the uses of algorithmic modelling and machine learning in the children’s social and welfare system in London. She has also worked within healthcare, looking at the ways in which AI and digital phenotyping are used to create ‘personalised’ mental healthcare, and she is currently working within a fintech companying, developing a new type of AI model that seeks to interpret financial vulnerability in a cultural variable way, drawing on ethnographic data sources. She is an affiliate member of the Alan Turing Institute, and was previously Leach Fellow in Public Anthropology at the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. As a previous finalist of the BBC New Generation Thinker Award, she continues to participate in public speaking on radio and at conferences and festivals, to speak about anthropology to broader audiences. Her first monograph, ‘Circulating Culture’, was published in 2023 with University Press of Florida.

Narmala Halstead

Narmala Halstead is an anthropologist exploring co-creations of knowledge and contemporary changes in several cities. Her current research - Guyana and diasporic locations - incorporates hate speech, violence and privacy issues on social media. Her research extends to ‘unintended’ posts and videos, publicly or secretly filmed and considers questions about the knowledges sought or projected about persons being forced to be of such publics. This is part of a larger project on social justice, belonging and new forms of migration. Narmala held a Readership in Anthropology, University of East London and was convenor of the MSc in Anthropology, Human Rights and Justice. Previously, she was a lecturer at Cardiff University. She also taught at Brunel University London. She currently contributes as a socio-legal consultant on various projects on criminal justice reform and related issues. Her professional media experience includes work as a TV producer.

Her earlier research on families watching television followed interconnected themes of respect relations and makings of home amidst extensive movement and socio-political upheavals. Publications include a recent monograph, ‘Competing Power. Landscapes of migration, violence and the state (Berghahn, 2018);  Digital and offline: partial fields and knowledge producers(Social Analysis, 2021).  A landscape of respect relations. Television, status, houses. (Home Cultures, 2009); Branding ‘perfection’. Foreign as self; self as foreign-foreign. (Journal of Material Culture, 2002). See also her open access commentary, Do No harm. From which  (or whose) sides must we speak? (Journal of Legal Anthropology, 2022).

Heather Horst

Heather A. Horst is a sociocultural anthropologist who researches material culture and the mediation of social relations through digital media and technology. Her recent books focused upon these themes include The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones: Pacific Island Perspectives (Foster and Horst, eds. 2018), Hanging Around, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, 10th Anniversary Edition (Ito, et al. 2019); Location Technologies in International Context (Wilken, Goggin and Horst, eds. 2019) and Digital Media Practices in Households (Hjorth, et al. 2020). Her current research focuses upon the growth and development Fijian fashion industry and the infrastructures automation technologies outside of the global north as part of her work in the ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision Making and Society. Heather is currently Professor and Director of the Institute of Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and an Honorary Professor at the Centre for Digital Anthropology at University College London.

Yiyi Linh

My academic focus has been on examining the intersection between resistant dynamics within youth culture and the persistence of structural inequality. My doctoral research project delves into the role of made-in-China otome games as a cultural arena for the production of "female complaints" against toxic masculinity ingrained in traditional gender norms. This research aims to ethnographically explore how a predominantly female player community utilizes these games as a platform for engaging in cyberfeminist practices and how the consequences of these practices intrude on, transform, and bring possibilities and challenges to their everyday lives, while acknowledging their limitations and privileges due to the Chinese version of class inequality and rural-urban disparity. Ultimately, this research endeavors to enhance our understanding of individuals' agency in a digital era. I am also interested in how cyberspace can facilitate or impede individuals in discerning and discharging their moral responsibility against injustice within their specific situations.

Maria Nolan

Maria Nolan is a digital anthropologist with a regional focus on urban China, who completed her doctoral studies at SOAS University of London in 2020. Her doctoral research explored the emergence in China of zhai, which loosely refers to a tendency towards staying at home, and traced the unfolding of new modes of sociality among young people in a society rapidly evolving alongside innovations in digital media. Since completing her doctoral studies, Maria has conducted digital research exploring the social and psychological impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on young people in China and in Ireland. She is currently developing a project focusing on approaches to mental health and wellbeing among Chinese overseas students in the UK and the role that digital spaces play in serving their mental health needs.

Alice Roberte

My PhD research project focuses on the mid and long-term consequences of the pandemic for the middle classes living in Brasilia, Brazil. Grounded in the disciplines of digital anthropology and digital communications studies, my project strives to contribute to the theoretical understanding of the "New Normal". I'm interested to analyze the transformations that took place in the routine of Brazilian white-collars, especially in terms of work, intimacy and relationships, care and practices of hygiene and cleaning, food, entertainment, the balance between the public and private and also between the online and the offline. Through the ethnographic lense I aim to understand the relevance of digital communications to these topics and how screens, especially the smartphone, have redefined the notion of the conventional home during the pandemic, rearranging our culture and producing new daily lives and new ways of being in the world.

Josiah Taru

Josiah Taru trained as an economic anthropologist under the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria. His work focuses on how Pentecostalism shapes individual and collective economic subjectivities of Pentecostals in Harare, Zimbabwe. In the last three years, Josiah’s research interest has been shifting toward digital anthropology by exploring the intersection of religion, technology, and social media. In one of his works, Josiah explores ways in which social media reconfigures relations and interactions between Pentecostal clergy and the laity. The chapter illustrates how young Pentecostals rely on their ICT skills to gain some degree of authority on online spaces and attempts by the clergy to limit such authority. As part of the Technology and Society: Anthropological Approaches - Africa and Beyond at KU Leuven, Josiah examines the Pentecostals’ sociality, intimacy, and the creation of affective vibes through online spaces during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Zimbabwe.

Xinyuan Wang

Xinyuan Wang’s first book Social Media in Industrial China examined the simultaneous migration of factory workers from rural to factory China and from offline to online showing how the latter brought them closer to their aspirations. Her new book Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China, which has also been published as open access with UCL Press, looks at another parallel between the smartphone revolution and the earlier experience of this same population in the Cultural Revolution showing how this is the foundation for understanding their subsequent relationship to smartphones. Xinyuan has many journal papers and book chapters, has made two programmes for the BBC world service, was awarded The Daphne Oram Award Lecture for her contribution to UK science and exhibited her art and photography work at the Open Eye Gallery.

Xinru Li

Xinru Li earned her PhD degree from SOAS University of London in 2022. Her doctoral research explored the social, cultural, and political significance of Hunan TV/Mango TV, the most popular local television channel among youths, by examining its role in the reconstitution of the nation and youth identity in contemporary China from both production and consumption perspectives. Her current research, with a particular emphasis on the lower classes, delves into the concept and application of low-end AI in Northeast China—a region characterised by its abundant natural resources, extreme cold weather, and post-industrial landscape. It traces the implementation of AI from Hegang City, a coal mining city renowned for its low housing prices highlighted on the Internet, to Harbin, the capital city of Heilongjiang Province, focusing especially on the impacts on the lower classes and the AI engineers' interpretations and practices concerning AI. The research questions address the variations in AI implementation, the implications of AI mimicry, and the distribution of benefits and drawbacks within society. Xinru is currently a lecturer at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Harbin Engineering University.

PhD Students

Harshadha Balasubramanian (Started 2019)

An Anthropology of Virtual Reality Creation

Harsha studies the experiences of virtual reality (VR) content creators who are seeking to rethink the sensory understandings and practices that guide VR content creation. Imbedded within several teams of artists across London and Bristol, Harsha’s PhD research traces how and why creatives negotiate the sensory politics of VR creation- all the way through fundraising, ideation, production, and distribution. Harsha’s project is further informed by practical experience making VR content, including an internship at Microsoft Research. Therefore, this multisited ethnographic work leverages embodied, autoethnographic approaches to address what it means to sense in VR and how these understandings emerge.

Dave Cook (Started 2017)

Digital Nomads in Southeast Asia

My research explores the lives of self-described digital nomads, who work out of co-working spaces in Southeast Asia, mainly Chiang Mai. I’m interested in the work practices and routines that are imagined and practiced to sustain working on the road. In addition, the imaginary and material traces that are created by and produced for digital nomads are investigated.

The research also explores the functions and roles that coworking spaces play in supporting digital nomads and investigates the elaborate strategies that digital nomads utilise, including digital mediated time management, self-regulation, skills maintenance, image management and personal branding. I also look at how digital nomads try to reframe the concept of citizenship, and its associated structures such as a tax, money, visas, and through entrepreneurship in its various guises. 

Juan Forero Duarte (Started 2020)

(In)Formation Technologies: Digital Education State Programmes in Colombia

My project examines the experiences of public-school teachers involved in deploying digital education policies in Colombia. Through public-private programmes, the Colombian State is delivering 3D printers, drones, robotic kits, and block-based coding software (among others) to public schools all around the country. The goal is to 'motivate' more pupils to study Engineering and Technology degrees and cultivate skills needed in the so-called Digital Era. I aim to understand how schoolteachers and other public servants navigate the entanglement of those objects and policies with political clientelism, corruption, fragmented infrastructures, and neoliberal imperatives of self-improvement.

Chun Liu (Started 2021)

Digital technologies in the social transformation in southwest China

My project looks into the role digital technologies play in the social transformation in southwest China. It starts from looking into how individuals strategically cultivate new power by reorganising the socio-economic network with the advance of digital technologies such as WeChat, and how this new socio-economic power forms clashes with the conventional social structure that have been established for a long time. In these power dynamics, multiple layers of the local society is deployed and unfolded, such as relationship between past and future, cultural conception about space and spatiality, and the relationship between the individual and society which is one of the most fundamental question in anthropology. Put together, the digital technology provides a perspective into a holistic view of the transforming society in southwest China, which further the wider understanding about social transformation in anthropology.  

Sam Meeson-Frizelle

Bit-Coin mining in Paraguay

My research sets out to trace the material contours and contested energo-political relations of Bitcoin "mining" in Paraguay.  I am interested by how a seemingly abundant supply of hydroelectric energy and a favourable regulatory setting in Paraguay attracts industrial scale mining companies from the Global North. Yet, my research crucially asks how this might challenge the energy and economic sovereignty of Paraguayan people and institutions. In doing so, I hope to bring to light the uneven material and political terrain that permeates a contemporary digital economy.

Ibnu Nadzir (Started 2022)

Sociality of Startup Ecosystem in Indonesia

Ibnu Nadzir's research focuses on the production of social practices and norms that emerge among Indonesians whose works are related to startup development. The study is based mainly on startup workers and founders in Jakarta, which is central to Indonesian economic investments. Drawing from his participation in startup events such as seminars, pitching contests, and hack sprints, he examines the role of the performative aspects of such activities in the development of startup entrepreneurship. From these observations, the research also investigates the linkage between the startup financial logic and the established social structures in Indonesia. Moreover, the study also delves into the way Indonesian startup workers and founders negotiate and navigate the global startup frameworks amidst the turbulence and precarity that comes from the lack of investment, often called the 'technological winter.' Some of his publications are accessible from this page.

Alice McAlpine-Riddell (Started 2020)

Safety and surveillance in New York City 

Alice's research examines the digitization of safety and surveillance as an everyday practice in Brooklyn, New York City, through Citizen, a live crime and safety tracking app, and social media, like Instagram and TikTok. She is also interested in the material culture of self-defence in the form of safety gadgets, such as alarms and tasers, the securitization of everyday objects like headphones and sunglasses, and the body as a technology of security. Alice's research explores such entanglements as 'safety assemblages', comprised of fluid and relational actants, intersecting positionalities, places, and modalities. She is currently a voluntary research consultant for The Power Project, a charity that promotes trauma-informed and embodied self-defence and movement for those living with the effects of violence. 

Publications:
McAlpine-Riddell, A., (2025) ‘Uncertain Times: Citizen app and Personalisation of Security in New York City’, Rhythm and Vigilance, Bristol University Press (forthcoming).

Riddell, A., (2023) ‘Intersecting Positionalities and the Unexpected Uses of Digital Crime and Safety Tracking in Brooklyn’, Social Inclusion, 11(3), pp: 30-40.
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/article/view/6615/3343 

Glazer, E., Manoussaki-Adamopoulou, Riddell, A., & Tecca, V., (Winter 2022/2023) PAPER: Reflections on the making of an anti-colonial pedagogical project, Anthropolitan, 18 (Special Issue).

Kellynn Wee (Started 2020)

Tabletop Role-Playing Games in Singapore

Kellynn Wee’s research focuses on speculation, play, and contingency in tabletop roleplaying games in Singapore. She explores how TTRPGs played and made in Asia transform taken-for-granted genres and contexts of Western fantasy. She is also interested in how TTRPGs make the conditions of reality explicit and changeable, and how this experience resonates in players’ constructions of broader cultural and social worlds. Check Kellynn's website.

Kunyu Xiang (Started 2021)

Short Video Social Media in China

My doctoral research examines how residents of a county-level city in central China engage with short-video social media, particularly Douyin, and the broader implications of these interactions. I focus on how short-video practices interact with local normative frameworks—encompassing long-standing values, moral and ethical codes, social conventions, gender culture, and conceptions of time—which both reflect tradition and shape local culture. At the same time, I critically examine China’s urban classification system and its associated discourses in the digital era, seeking to understand what it means to be a "resident of a fourth-tier city" and how this identity both influences and is reshaped by the social media practices of the residents.

Ken Zheng (Started 2020)

The Backstage of the Social Media in China

Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a prominent social media company in Beijing, I examine how Chinese IT professionals design, operate, and maintain social media platforms on a daily basis. My ethnographic research explores the often-overlooked, mundane, and highly technical yet simultaneously manual aspects of platform operations. During my fieldwork, I was deeply involved in designing algorithmic systems, drafting, developing, and releasing prototypes to the public, as well as conducting user research through various methods. Based on it, my ethnography aims to provide academics and the general public with a rare glimpse into the backstage operations of social media platforms, exploring how these IT professionals conceptualise their users, manage their development workflows, and determine success through specific measurement frameworks.

More broadly, this project investigates the intertwined relationship between the self-development of Chinese IT professionals, corporate pursuits of numerical traffic growth, and the broader digitalisation of China. My recent publication examines the ways in which data culture extends beyond the practices of Chinese IT professionals into broader social domains. See: Zheng, K. (2024). Unintended consequences: data practice in the backstage of social media. Journal of Chinese Sociology, 11(11). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40711-024-00210-2.

Leeya Mor

I am a second-year PhD student at the UCL Anthropology Department currently undertaking fieldwork. My research focuses on music listening practices in family life among the Israeli community residing in London. I explore how digital platforms such as Spotify and YouTube, as well as less conventional mediums like WhatsApp and algorithmically curated playlists, facilitate listening practices within family homes. Looking at how these platforms shape family dynamics, identity construction, and national identification, my research investigates the role of digital technologies in transforming the domestic sonic space. Through an ethnographic lens, I aim to reveal how digital music practices mediate cultural memory, intergenerational connection and diasporic belonging.

Digital Anthropology Network

Directory of Digital Anthropologists

As a joint initiative, the Departments of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, Manchester and UCL hosted an informal day for anthropologists in May 2023 around the UK who were involved in some way or other in the field of digital anthropology. 

This is a directory of digital anthropologists in/around the UK as of June 2023, which will be updated when the next Digital Anthropology Day is held in 2024.