Our conversation on this episode, On Data, is with  Alec Bălăşescu, associate faculty at the Royal Roads University in British Columbia, Canada. Bălăşescu is a social and cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching range from bodily aesthetics, fashion, and politics to human-technology interactions, climate change, and health, Primarily through the prism of machine learning, algorithms and their implications for an ethnographic imagination. 

Bălăşescu is the author of Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills: Aesthetic Bodies, Political Subjects (2007), a book that traces the circulations of fashion between France and Iran to reflect on the intersections of consumption, modernity, and religion. His more recent work  revolves around human-technology interactions: “Machine Anthropology, Or, Will Robots Talk About Us Behind Our Backs” (2020); and “Augmented Anthropology: Interstitial Anthropology in the Limits of Humanity.” (2024), co-authored with Cristina Luna and published in the Journal of Future Robot Life.  

Host:

George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.

Production: 

Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.