Lake Polan studies the production of digital infrastructure as a key site of contestation over the conditions of possibility for a democratic everyday life. Lake’s dissertation, When Privacy Goes Private, is an ethnographic study of Silicon Valley-based efforts to engineer culturally recognizable forms of privacy into internet technologies. Through the perspectives of software engineers, designers, computer scientists, and entrepreneurs, it analyzes what it means for American understandings of privacy for engineers to join lawyers as agents of its future. The dissertation argues that technological stewardship is transforming privacy’s logic, form, and sensibilities according to the value systems and historical projects of Silicon Valley-style software development, speculative venture capital, and the national security state.
Lake holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. As a Teaching Fellow, Lake offers courses in the Department of Anthropology and the Pozen Center for Human Rights.
Rafadi Hakim is a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist whose research examines how gender, kinship, and religion emerge as relational categories through uses of language in everyday social interaction. His current book project, “Togetherness: Language, Relationality, and the Politics of Exchange,” is based on ethnographic fieldwork among Protestant church congregations and women’s co-operative credit associations in Kupang, eastern Indonesia. His second project, based in the United States, investigates how queer forms of kinship are enacted through storytelling practices.
Hakim received PhD and MA degrees in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Carleton College. His research has been funded by, among others, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
In the 2023-24 academic year, Hakim will offer the following courses: Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (Winter 2024); Language, Gender, and Sexuality (Spring 2024); and parts 1 and 3 of the Self, Culture, and Society core course sequence (Fall 2023 and Spring 2024).