Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

The workshop features short presentations by UF faculty members and students, followed by an open dialogue with Dr. Victoria Bernal of UC Irvine. It is open to anyone interested in exploring how anthropologists and social scientists engage with ethnography – both as a method and form of communication – to make sense of an increasingly digitized world.

Victoria Bernal is a cultural anthropologist whose scholarship in political anthropology contributes to media and IT studies, gender studies, and African studies. Bernal’s 2014 book, Nation as Network: Diaspora, Cyberspace and Citizenship argues that a profound political shift is underway as digital media coupled with migration reconfigure relationships between citizens and states. She is currently working on a new project on politics and the internet focused on the shifting cultural understandings and practices related to citizens’ privacy, government secrecy, and state surveillance.