Jennifer Cearns

Dr Jennifer Cearns is a digital anthropologist, specialising in AI and algorithms in social life. Her research focuses on how people relate to one another through emerging intelligent technologies, exploring the ideological and cultural underpinnings of these new formulations of the self, personhood and kinship. 

To date, she has conducted ethnographic research in Brazil, Cuba, the US, Guyana, Panama, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. She has also worked in the technology industry as a consultant for over a decade, influencing the design of technologies where they're built. 

She is also a Visiting Professor at KU Leuven in Belgium. Prior to this, she was a Lecturer in Digital Anthropology at UCL, an Associate Postdoctoral Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, and Leach Fellow in Public Anthropology at the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland. 

Her first monograph was published in 2023 by University Press of Florida, and has been nominated for the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists First Book Prize and the Society for Latin American & Caribbean Anthropology Book Prize by the American Anthropological Association. 

She was previously a Finalist of the BBC New Generation Thinker Award, and has spoken on radio, television and at festivals about digital culture.