Jennifer Cearns

I am a digital anthropologist, specialising in AI and algorithms in social life. My 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. I am currently conducting researching into Human-AI relations, looking at intimacy and how trust and empathy forms between humans and AIs. My research considers romantic relationships with AI, grief and bereavement, AI and memory aids for those living with dementia, the epistmology of AI, and the role of AI in embryo selection. 

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

I am a Visiting Professor at KU Leuven in Belgium, where I have recently been collaborating with scholars looking at privatisation of social housing across the Global South. I have been conducting fieldwork in Cuba, considering the emerging role of the private sector within socialist housing structures on the island, and am currently working on a book project about a broader perceived shift in values (both economic and moral) in Cuba. 

Prior to this, I 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. I completed my PhD in Anthropology at UCL in 2020, with a thesis examining material and digital exchange between socialism and capitalism in Cuba and across Central and North America, with a focus on the kinship ties that underpin informal economies. 

My first monograph — Circulating Culture — 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. The book examines how, despite decades of diplomatic hostilities and economic sanctions, the border between Cuba and the United States—arguably one of the most politicized in the world—is in a state of constant flux. Tracing the flows of people, material items, and digital content between Havana and Miami, as well as between Cuba and Panama, Guyana, and Mexico, I explore how and why these circuits are a part of everyday life for millions of Cubans who negotiate extraordinary circumstances daily.

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

I am interesting in supervising students working on the following themes:

• Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, technology and (self) surveillance / tracking, digital technology and intimacy
• kinship, personhood, relation to self and other
• Cuba, (urban) Latin America, (post)socialism, migration and/or diaspora
• exchange, value, anthropology of capitalism/ socialism, informal economy