I am currently Assistant Professor at NOVA FCSH, Department of Communication Sciences as well as a member of ICNOVA - Communications Institute of Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. In 2011, I came to my home country, Portugal as a Marie Curie Fellow, and in 2013 I resigned from York University (Canada) where I was Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Communications. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2005 with a dissertation that examined the multiple and conflicted meanings of bodily augmentation through wearable computers, and went on to be a Research Associate at Cornell University, USA.
In 2019, I was honored by Ciência Viva (Portugal’s National Agency for Scientific and Technological Culture) as one of Portugal’s 100 Female Scientists. I was elected by my peers to serve as a Member Council of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in 2018.
Anchoring my thinking in digital media studies, feminist technoscience and 'science and technology studies,' I specialize in ethnographic studies of technoscientific innovation. In the media and policy realms what I do is sometimes called ‘social and cultural implications of science and technology,’ engineers refer to it as 'human-factors research' but these terms are deceivingly simple. In my research I strive to characterize and retain the complexity of our relations to technoscience, examining how distinct digital media materialize, reify and transform particular understandings and imaginaries of the world. I seek to represent and often intervene in these strange hybrid worlds.
I have two complementary research lines:
(1) The critical examination of technosciences that posit the body as the interface between biology and information (or, to use today's vocabulary, data). Here I investigate how different media recraft, reify and produce values, facts and frameworks about the body, personhood, and agency, and how these are negotiated, acquiring affective and effective power. I have, so far, examined these issues in the field of wearable computers, and in my ongoing ethnography of the 'Quantifed Self' movement.
(2) The study of the politics and policies of contemporary technoscienfic governance. In particular, I am interested in examining how science is governed, regulated and financed, in the name of creating "better and responsible science." I have recently published two articles on the integration of the social sciences in R&D projects, one in Nature and the other in Social Studies of Science.
I am currently organizing a series of conversations on Data&Us that runs during 2022, and seeks to contribute to a reflection of the role(s) of data in contemporary society. Find out more here.
I have received funding from FCT for a new research project on ‘Autonomous Stores’ that will start in 2023! More on this soon!!
For a more detailed explanation of my work please click here.
I am always interested in collaborating with colleagues with similar interests, as well as in working with MA or Ph.D. students who use critical media studies, feminist technoscience, actor-network theory or cyborg anthropology approaches to examine the practices of technological/media development and use, particularly in regards to emergent information and communication technologies, cyborgs and other augmented bodies (such as robotics, nano, wearable computing, artificial intelligence, to name a few). If you are thinking of pursuing graduate studies and would like to tell me more about your research and/or know more about mine don't hesitate to drop me a line.
Email: ana@anaviseu dot org