Welcome to our informal interview series with visitors to the research group. It is called Tea in TiP because interviewees are invited to share a cup of tea (digitally, virtually, in person, and sometimes coffee) and talk about what they hope to work on while visiting ITU and TiP.
Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes is visiting from Oregon State University where they are a PhD student writing up.
RDJ: Hi Ana, welcome to TiP! Tell us about your project!
I’m currently grappling with how much academic research changes from our initial proposal for PhD admission, then to grant funding proposals and to the actual research that ends up being part of your dissertation (in the USA, thesis are the products of masters’ research).
I’ve been working with “cultures of computing” since my master’s in anthropology from a Brazilian university (Universidade Federal de Goiás). This term has meant different things from time to time, and I think this is a typical route for most AI anthropologists out there, but the questions that have animated my research have been how does AI make sense of the world? But what specific AI application? Developed by whom? What data was used for its training? Where does this data live? What are the legal implications of such data handling? How is this data classified, etc? All this to say that focusing on all these questions for the last years have made me now focused on the material aspects of AI, and as such, I now conduct research in the Oregon desert, home of several “enterprise” data centers.
I’m advised by brilliant anthropologist Dr. Emily Yates-Doerr who always has the best comments, reading suggestions and makes sure my ideas are down to earth.
What are you/will you be working on here at ITU – is it what you came to do?
During my visit to ITU I’ll be working closely with Dr. Rachel Douglas-Jones and the Technologies in Practice group (TiP). I already have a clear and detailed schedule of my activities at the university, and I’ll be offering guest lectures, a writing workshop–I used to teach English and composition, and to work at an Undergraduate Writing Center and have some tips to share when it comes to academic writing. I plan to present some of my work at one of the salons, and I’m really looking forward to being part of an STS community. Being in a small department plus the pandemic have really made me feel very lonely and I need to be around like-minded folks!
What have you/do you hope to learn about academia from visiting another institutional context?
I come from an Applied Anthropology Department. While some students and professors’ research do overlap with topics in STS at OSU, we are a small department and I’m in need of exchanging knowledge and being part of a broader STS community. I first learned about TiP in the context of the Research, Interrupted workshop back in 2020, and I met Dr. Douglas-Jones in-person at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association that took place in Seattle, WA in 2022. I know it will make a difference in my career and PhD experience to be part of an STS lab with students advancing research methods from social sciences in general, but also from computing and anthropology. I feel like a teenager who just wants to belong and be part of something big. I want to be part of a community of STS scholars, exchanging ideas and just being in space with folks who are interested in similar topics. Who, in a way, speaks the same language…
How are you handling the pandemic’s effects on your PhD project?
The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted all aspects of my research and PhD experience. As an international student, I was pretty upset to take most of my required courses online. This wasn’t why I came to the US! To have classes on Zoom? Of course that impacted questions related to fieldwork, so I decided, as many other scholars, to learn more about archival research and read about possible ethnographies stemming from the analysis of documents and datasets. I also took computer programming courses and in a way, learned “new languages” to be able to communicate with my interlocutors and the code they were developing. Is there anything more anthropological than that? The difference was that I was doing all that from my tiny apartment in Corvallis, OR.
I do feel like the pandemic has forced the anthropological community, in the US, at least, to broaden its horizons in terms of what counts as fieldwork. Feminist scholars and those scholars at the margins of academia have long grappled with the “traditional conceptions” of fieldwork. Who can travel for a year and leave everything behind to collect data? What if you have kids or other caretaking responsibilities? What if visa restrictions make it impossible to travel? During the pandemic, I feel like many anthropologists were faced with what ethnographic fieldwork has meant and how that has favored privileged groups in the anthropological community, while excluding those who for a reason or another could not commit to such activities.
So, the way all this translates to my research is, I’m collecting a lot of data online, through surveys and online interviews. A lot of my data also stems from archival records, such as books, information available online and other documents shared by my research participants. Of course I still need to visit my fieldsite, but also, while writing grant applications, I also need to provide a “plan B”, or what I’ll do in case the pandemic, or other catastrophes make person-to-person encounters impossible. Let’s acknowledge it, the Covid-19 pandemic has completely changed anthropological research, or at least shaken some of its most basic assumptions.
Where can we read your work – published or forthcoming – or hear you at conferences in the next year or so?
I’m currently a co-chair for the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing from the American Anthropological Association and some of my recent work can be found on their website: https://blog.castac.org/author/ana-carolinade-assis-nunes/
You can find a fun work about research methods in the context of the pandemic on this link: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:48563/
A quick Google search will also lead you to some of my public and academic scholarships – and now I’m thinking I might need to have a personal website. Do I need it? 🙂
We can also connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ana-carolina-d-1203a322a/