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Our conversation on this episode, On Data, is with Alec Bălăşescu, associate faculty at the Royal Roads University in British Columbia, Canada. Bălăşescu is a social and cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching range from bodily aesthetics, fashion, and politics to human-technology interactions, climate change, and health, Primarily through the prism of machine learning, algorithms and their implications for an ethnographic imagination.
Bălăşescu is the author of Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills: Aesthetic Bodies, Political Subjects (2007), a book that traces the circulations of fashion between France and Iran to reflect on the intersections of consumption, modernity, and religion. His more recent work revolves around human-technology interactions: “Machine Anthropology, Or, Will Robots Talk About Us Behind Our Backs” (2020); and “Augmented Anthropology: Interstitial Anthropology in the Limits of Humanity.” (2024), co-authored with Cristina Luna and published in the Journal of Future Robot Life.
Host:
George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.
Production:
Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.
Our conversation on this episode, On Data, is with Alec Bălăşescu, associate faculty at the Royal Roads University in British Columbia, Canada. Bălăşescu is a social and cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching range from bodily aesthetics, fashion, and politics to human-technology interactions, climate change, and health, Primarily through the prism of machine learning, algorithms and their implications for an ethnographic imagination.
Bălăşescu is the author of Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills: Aesthetic Bodies, Political Subjects (2007), a book that traces the circulations of fashion between France and Iran to reflect on the intersections of consumption, modernity, and religion. His more recent work revolves around human-technology interactions: “Machine Anthropology, Or, Will Robots Talk About Us Behind Our Backs” (2020); and “Augmented Anthropology: Interstitial Anthropology in the Limits of Humanity.” (2024), co-authored with Cristina Luna and published in the Journal of Future Robot Life.
Host:
George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.
Production:
Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.