Faculty

Gabriella Coleman

Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication

Gabriella Coleman

Phone: 212-992-7696
Email:

Curriculum Vitae/Syllabi

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who examines ethics and online collaboration as well as the role of the law and new media technologies in extending and critiquing liberal values and sustaining new forms of political activism. Between 2001-2003 she conducted ethnographic research on computer hackers primarily in San Francisco, the Netherlands, as well as those hackers who work on the largest free software project, Debian. She is completing a book manuscript "Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software" (under contract with Princeton University Press) and is starting a new project on peer to peer patient activism on the Internet with a focus on psychiatric survivors and lyme disease patients. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including ones from the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.


Degrees Held

  • B.A. Columbia University 1996
    Religion
  • Ph.D. University of Chicago 2005
    Socio-Cultural Anthropology

Awards

  • 2009 : NYU Gabriel Carras Research Award for "Code is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers." Cultural Anthropology
  • 2006 : Sol Tax Dissertation Prize, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago. Awarded for the dissertation that combines highest intellectual merit with relevance to Anthropology and action.
  • 2006 : Julien Mezey Dissertation Award. Association for the Study of Law, Culture and Humanities. Awarded for the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture, and the humanities.

Publications

  • "Code is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers." Cultural Anthropology. Forthcoming, August 2009.
  • "In-Person Sociality: The Hacker Conference and the Distillation of a Lifeworld." Anthropological Quarterly, Forthcoming, Summer 2009.
  • "Hacker Practice: Moral Genres and the Cultural Articulation of Liberalism" (with Alex Golub). Anthropological Theory, Vol. 8, No. 3, 255-277: 2008 (link)
  • “The Politics of Rationality: Psychiatric Survivor’s Challenge to Psychiatry." In Tactical Biopolitics Art, Activism, and Technoscience. Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, eds. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008 (link)
  • Los Temps d'Indymedia. Multitudes. (21): 41-N48, May 2005. (link)
  • Indymedia's Independence: From Activist Media to Free Software (English Version of Los Temps d'Indymedia. Multitudes. (21): 41-N48, May 2005.) (link)
  • "The Social Production of Ethics in Debian and Free Software Communities." In Free and Open Source Software Development. Stefan Koch (ed.). Idea group, 2004. (with Mako Hill) (link)
  • "The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast. Anthropology Quarterly." 77(03): 507-519, Summer 2004. (link)
  • "How Free Became Open and Everything Else Under the Sun." M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture, July 2004. (with Mako Hill) (link)

Courses

  • Impacts of Technology
  • Introduction to Human Culture and Communication
  • Topics in Digital Media
  • The Culture and Politics of Computer Hacking

Research Interests


  • Computers, Hacking, and Free and Open Source Software
  • Liberalism and Communication
  • Patient/Health Activism and the Internet
  • Psychiatry and Psychiatric Suvivors/Consumers
  • Technology and the Body