MIT Anthropology Postdocs & Visitors
Featured Visitor
Beth Semel
Dr. Beth Semel holds a PhD from MIT in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society, and an MA in Anthropology from Brandeis University. Her work explores the intersection of computing, biomedicine, and communication sciences in the contemporary United States.
Since 2015, she has been ethnographically studying Computational Psychiatry, focusing on efforts to integrate machine listening techniques into psychiatric research and medicine. Through a behind-the-screen look at the labor involved in building and testing psychiatric listening technologies with research subjects, she tracks how these projects torque and reiterate hegemonic ideas about listening, language, automation, expertise, and care. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Weatherhead Foundation, and the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and published in The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.
As a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, she will teach 21A.151 Language, Culture, and Communication. She will also conduct preliminary research for her second project on the creation of synthetic voices for a variety of applications, from voice banking and personalized assistive communication technologies to so-called vocal deep fakes.
Héctor Beltrán is a Postdoctoral Associate and incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT. His current manuscript, “Code Work: Hacking Across the Techno-Borderlands,” examines the political economy of knowledge work and manifestations of “hacking” between the U.S. and Mexico.
He completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology with an M.A. in Folklore at U.C. Berkeley and he holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT.
His research has been funded by the School for Advanced Research, The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Social Science Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, Ford Foundation, U.C.-Mexus, and U.C. Berkeley Institute for the Study of Societal Issues.
http://www.hectorbeltran.org/
MIT Anthropology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Mass. Ave, E53-335, Cambridge, MA 02142
ph: 617.452.2837 fax: 617.253.5363 anthro@mit.edu
