Gabriella Coleman: The History and Impact of the Hacktivist and Nation State Hack and Leak
Date/Time
Date(s) - 21/01/2025
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Location
The Murrow Room
Categories
Please join the Hitachi Center for Technology and International Affairs for a conversation with anthropologist Gabriella Coleman from Harvard University. She will speak about her research on the history of hackers and hacking. Professor Josephine Wolff will moderate the conversation.
The event is open to members of the Fletcher and Tufts communities and invited guests. Please register via the following Microsoft Form to attend the event in person or let us know if you would like to attend virtually. If you would like to submit discussion questions for the speaker in advance, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. Lunch will be served at the beginning of the event. Please let us know if you have any dietary restrictions, and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Gabriella (Biella) Coleman is a full professor in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and is a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Trained as an anthropologist, her scholarship covers the politics, cultures, and ethics of hacking. She is the author of two books on computer hackers and the founder and editor of Hack_Curio, a video portal into the cultures of hacking. Her first book, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, was published in 2013 by Princeton University Press. She then published Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014), which was named to Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2014 and awarded the Diana Forsythe Prize by the American Anthropological Association. With Matt Goerzen, she is currently completing a multi-year research project on the security field and hacker professionalization during the 1990s and early 2000s and will be publishing two Data and Society Reports based on this research. She is also working on a book of essays about hackers and the state and will deliver material from the book for the 2022 Henry Morgan Lectures. Gabriella frequently comments on hacker movements, digital culture, and cyberpolitics. In 2011, she was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec. Before joining the Harvard Anthropology Department in 2021, she held the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University and was an assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. In 2005, she received her Ph.D. in Socio-cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago.