Department of Media, Culture, and Communication

Gabriella Coleman

Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication

Gabriella Coleman

Phone: 212-992-7696
Email:

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who examines 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. In 2005-2006 she was a fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University and last year was a Killam postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta. She is completing a book manuscript "Coding Liberal Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software" and is starting a new project on patient activism on the Internet with a focus on psychiatric survivors and consumers. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including ones from the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.


Degrees Held

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

Courses

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

Awards

  • 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

  • "Hacker Practice: Moral Genres and the Cultural articulation of Liberalism" (with Alex Golub). Vol. 8, No. 3, 255-277 Anthropological Theory, 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)
  • The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast. Anthropology Quarterly. 77(03): 507-519, Summer 2004. (link)
  • 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. (link)

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