Alison Cool is a cultural anthropologist and her teachings and research focus on science, medicine, and technology. She is especially interested in digital technologies, data ethics, and how people think about privacy and surveillance.
She conducts fieldwork in Sweden exploring how people live and work with data. Her main project right now is an ethnographic study of how experts, professionals, and activists go about the ethical and pragmatic work of protecting and sharing personal data. This project compares the everyday work of people who produce privacy and security in Sweden with the protections offered in transnational data regulation. The aim of this research is to identify discrepancies between data law and data practice and to understand how people develop ethical relationships with data.
She also researches and writes about how behavioral economists see the world and the role of twins as scientific and medical research subjects.
Selected Course Offerings:
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Politics of Data and Numbers, Cultures of Expertise, Ethnography of Scandinavia, Science Technology and Society
Selected Publications
2016听听BioSocieties, 11(3): 277-295.
2016 鈥淟aboratories.鈥� In听. Ed. John L. Jackson. New York: Oxford University Press.
2015 鈥淎greeing Together: Comment on Alain Marciano鈥檚 Freedom, Choice, and Consent,鈥� Homo Oeconomicus 32(2): 297-300.
2015 鈥溙齈latypus, 15 September.
2014 鈥淭wins, nature and nurture,鈥� BioSocieties, 9(2), 225-227.
2014 鈥淪candinavia,鈥� In听. Ed. John L. Jackson, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press.听