Nancy Ettlinger
Contact Information
Professor, Department of Geography
Areas of Expertise
- Socio-Technic Change
- Critical Human Geography
- Poststructural Theory and Epistemology
- Governance of Neoliberal Life
- Culture and Economy; The Digital Economy
Education
- Ph.D., 1984 Geography, University of Oklahoma
- M.A., 1980 Geography, University of Oklahoma
- B.A., 1977 Anthropology, Hamilton College, Clinton NY
Current CV: Nancy Ettlinger.pdf
Interests: Critical Human Geography, Poststuctural Theory and Epistemology, Governance of Neoliberal Life, Culture and Economy, Systems of Production Consumption and Social In/justice.
Current Research: As a critical human geographer I ask: how can critiques of our social, political, economic, and cultural environment offer insights into how to produce change? How are people governed and enrolled in a wide range of societal projects (e.g. neoliberalism, segregation, democracy), and what are the prospects for resistance? What is the relation between subjectivity and change? Underscoring these questions is a concern for the relation between individuals and larger-scale phenomena (firms, institutions, societal projects) and an interconnected view of social, political, economic, and cultural processes.
Recently I have directed the general approach above to identifying, contextualizing, and explaining a new, digital regime of life and work that entails new modes of exploitation, notably of digital labor via various forms of crowdsourcing and firms’ covert capture of consumers’ personal data as they produce a digital footprint through their daily internet practices. I am interested how firms have capitalized on the digital infrastructure and the resultant capital-labor relation, as well as in the affordances of the digital infrastructure for ordinary people in new modes of digital resistance.