Assistant Professor, University of Florida
About Alix
I am a cultural anthropologist whose research is focused on the social, material, and political life of information. I am particularly interested in the infrastructures that store data, transmit it, and render its presence as natural (or aberrant, or spectacular, depending on where it is placed). My current book project examines information infrastructures in Iceland (including data centers, fiber-optic cables, and legislative regimes) as sites for negotiating questions of sovereignty, identity, and imperial power. Following the rise of the data storage industry, this work shows how the project of attracting data to Iceland is not just an economic calculus; it also mobilizes regional tensions, a legacy of American military occupation, and post-colonial formations of whiteness and masculinity. My next research project investigates the interface between emergent technologies, and entrenched social techniques of surveillance.