USC.edu

Jennifer Cool

Associate Professor (Teaching) of Anthropology
Jennifer Cool
Pronouns She / Her / Hers Email cool@usc.edu Office GFS 120 Office Phone (310) 498-2470

Biography

I am a social anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker whose work focuses on cultural production and reproduction in the U.S. and on dominant social imaginaries, such as the American dream of homeownership and the narrative of social revolution through technology. The first is the subject of my film Home Economics: a documentary of suburbia, which premiered nationally on the PBS Television series POV in 1995. The second is the focus of my current work on the ethnography and cultural history of networked social media.

Born in the Philippines and raised in South and Southeast Asia, I have worked in new media since 1992 when I wrote and produced chapters for Evolution/Revolution, part of the Columbus Project, a milestone multimedia title now on permanent display at the Library of Congress. From 1993 to 2003, I lived and worked as a participant-observer in Cyborganic, an intentional community of web geeks whose members brought Wired magazine online, launched Hotwired, the first ad-supported online magazine, led the open source Apache project, and staffed and started dozens of Internet enterprises, such as Craig’s List, during the first phase of the Web’s development as a popular platform. I have produced web media for Simon and Schuster and Institute for the Future, was a senior producer at Netscape, and was Director of New Media at Disney/ABC Cable Networks from 1999-2001.

Education

  • Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Southern California, 12/2008
  • M.A. Visual Anthropology, University of Southern California, 8/1993
  • A.B. Anthropology, magna cum laude, Harvard University, 5/1987

  • Research, Teaching, Practice, and Clinical Appointments

    • Lecturer, Applied Theatre Arts Program, University of Southern California, 2014-2015
    • Lecturer, Anthropology, University of Southern California, 2010-2017
    • Lecturer, Studio Art, University of California, Irvine, 2009-2012
    • Lecturer, Information & Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, 2002-2008
    • Lecturer, Cinema , San Francisco State University, 1994-1996

    Other Employment

    • Programmer/Analyst III, University of California, Irvine, 2002-2003
    • Director, New Media, Disney/ABC Cable Networks, 1999-2001
    • Senior Producer, Netscape Communications, 1998-1999
    • Media Ethnographer, Institute for the Future, Menlo Park, CA, 1997
    • Research Analyst, Institute for the Future, Menlo Park, CA, 1996-1997

  • Summary Statement of Research Interests

    My research of digital media and is motivated by what I see as a critical need for grounded, humanistic study of the discourses and practices of technopower. I study the social construction of new media and dominant cultural imaginaries and narratives of technology.

    Research Keywords

    Internet Culture and History, Computer-mediated Communication, Ethnographic Film, Critical Theories of Representation, Science and Technology Studies, Feminist Social Theory

    Detailed Statement of Research Interests

    My current project examines the evolution of the micro-blogging platform Twitter, from its earliest days—before what it was and how to use it had taken shape—challenging dominant narratives wherein inventions and inventors come to stand in for, and elide, messier, contingent processes of social construction. By looking at social and collective processes of innovation that have been misread and misremembered as the fruit of individual creativity, I seek to make visible the hidden histories of the communications media we use everyday. Last year, I presented the paper, "Speaking History to Technopower: Founding Narratives, Origin Stories, and Twitter, at the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S). The organizers are at work on an edited collection from this session, tentatively titled Tweeting the Revolution: Networked Media, the Rhetorics of Activism, and Practices of the Everyday.

    I am also working on a book proposal for Theorizing Production: Research Media from Field to Screen, a set of essays that mine my experience leading a program in Visual Anthropology and teaching anthropological media production. While ethnography is broadly accepted as a method across the social sciences and humanities, ethnographic filmmaking (ciné-ethnography), remains relatively obscure outside the sub-field, more than fifty years after its introduction to U.S. universities. This project aims to demonstrate the broader theoretical and methodological scope of ethnographic filmmaking as a mode of inquiry, while at the same time bringing principles of media and new media to bear on questions of doing cine-ethnography in the present moment. What binds works identified as “ethnographic film” is, first, filmmakers who feel a primary ethically responsibility to their subjects, rather than viewers or sponsors; and second, a common cultural history rooted in the communities of practice that shaped the genre.

    My most recent publication, "Gardening Metadata in the New Media Ecology: a Manifesto (of sorts) for Ethnographic Film" (American Anthropologist 2014) examines the ways digital technologies have radically altered the material conditions of production and distribution for all types of media, especially, the small-scale works characteristic of ethnographic film.  With this line of inquiry, I seek to identify ways in which a practice and genre developed over the 20th century within a system of craft production and institutional supports can adapt to the more fluid, dynamic, and individualized media ecology of today and realize the promise of participatory anthropology.

    My essay, “Co-location: Reconfigurations of Place and Embodiment from Cyborganic to Facebook” in the volume Human No More (2012) (Wesch and Whitehead, 2012), contributes to social theory of the post-human, introducing the theoretical concepts of co-location, presence casting, and configurable sociality. I argue that, while online life challenges traditional assumptions of place-based ethnography and the anthropological subject, practices of networked media reconfigure experiences and imaginaries of place, identity, and embodiment, without dematerializing these as sites of subjectivity and sources of anthropological insight.

    My scholarly agenda is shaped by a commitment to public scholarship and to the insights anthropology’s holistic and comparative perspective can bring to understanding the contemporary world through local articulations of global processes and structures. As co-Chair (since 2009) of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing (CASTAC) within the American Anthropological Association, I have worked to make science and technology studies more accessible both within and beyond the discipline. Earlier this year, I became Media Editor for Anthropology Now, a print magazine committed to claiming a public voice for anthropology.

  • Conference Presentations

    • SPECIAL SESSION: Cinepedia Ethnographica: Designing an Online, Crowdsourced Catalog for Ethnographic Film , 15th International Ethnographic Film FestivalTalk/Oral Presentation, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain a, Invited, University of Southern California, Spring 2018
    • Cinepedia Ethnographica Roundtable Gardening a Collaborative Catalog for the Study and Teaching of Ethnographic Film , American Anthropological AssociationRoundtable/Panel, Society for Visual Anthropology, Invited, Washington, D.C., Fall 2017
    • Cinepedia Ethnographica Workshop , Nordic Anthropological Film Association FilmfestRoundtable/Panel, Nordic Anthropological Film Association, Invited, Bergen, Norway, Fall 2016
    • The Past as Prologue: The Legacy of the Smithsonian’s Human Studies Film Archive, Invited Roundtable , American Anthropological Association Annual MeetingRoundtable/Panel, Society for Visual Anthropology, Invited, Denver, Colorado, Fall 2015
    • Up Yours: Critical Intimacy, Decentered Subjectivity, and Methodological Relativism , American Anthropological Association, Annual MeetingTalk/Oral Presentation, American Anthropological Association, Invited, Washington, DC, 2014-2015
    • Holistic Pedagogy, Invisible Labor , Interdisciplinary collaborations and creative connections: An Experiential Learning conferenceTalk/Oral Presentation, Sixth College, UCSD, Invited, University of California, San Diego , 2013-2014
    • Paradigms Remembered: Back to the Future of Ethnographic Film , Visible Evidence XX, International Conference on Documentary Film and MediaTalk/Oral Presentation, Stockholm University, Swedish Film Institute, Invited, Stockholm, Sweden, 2013-2014
    • Speaking History to Technopower: Founding Narratives, Origin Stories and Twitter , Society for the Social Studies of Science, Annual MeetingTalk/Oral Presentation, Society for the Social Studies of Science, Invited, San Diego, 2013-2014
    • What’s at Stake? A Discussion of Transparency, Authenticity, Application, Theory, and Accessibility in Public Anthropology , American Anthropological Association Annual MeetingsRoundtable/Panel, American Anthropological Association, Invited, Chicago, IL, 2013-2014
    • SENSORY BODIES AND CULTURAL PERFORMANCES: RECONFIGURING ILLNESS/DISABILITY/HEALING AT THE INTERSECTION OF VISUAL AND MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY , American Anthropological Association Annual MeetingsDiscussant, American Anthropological Association, Invited, San Francisco, CA, 2012-2013
    • VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY PROGRAMS ALONG THE PACIFIC RIM , American Anthropological Association Annual MeetingsRoundtable/Panel, American Anthropological Association, Invited, San Francisco, CA, 2012-2013
    • Cyborganic Chronicles: Temporal Orders In the Cultural Construction of Networked Life , American Anthropological Association Annual MeetingsTalk/Oral Presentation, American Anthropological Association, Invited, Montreal, Canada, 2011-2012
    • Co-location: Reconfigurations of Place and Embodiment from Cyborganic to Facebook , American Anthropological Association Annual MeetingsTalk/Oral Presentation, American Anthropological Association, Invited, Philadelphia, PA, 2009-2010
    • Walking the River: Fieldwork in the Information Age , Society for the Social Studies of Science, Annual MeetingTalk/Oral Presentation, Society for the Social Studies of Science, Invited, Montreal, Canada, 2007-2008
    • Place, Community, and Innovation in the Growth of San Francisco’s Internet Industry in the 1990s: The Case of Cyborganic , Governance, Place and Community in a Globalizing World, Doctoral Student Conference,Talk/Oral Presentation, School of Policy, Planning and Development, Invited, University of Southern California, 2005-2006
    • Utopian Socialities in an Entrepreneurial World: Cyborganic 1994-2003 , American Anthropological Association, Annual MeetingTalk/Oral Presentation, American Anthropological Association, Invited, Washington, DC, 2005-2006
    • Social Code: View Source as a Cultural Strategy , Society for the Social Studies of Science, Annual MeetingTalk/Oral Presentation, Society for the Social Studies of Science, Invited, Atlanta, GA, 2003-2004
    • Research Fellow (summer), Doing Digital History, Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.
      http://chnm.gmu.edu

  • Book Chapters

    • Cool, J. (2016). Lessons from the Analog: Ethnographic Filmmaking as Social Process. Practicing Ethnography: A Student Guide to Methods Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press.
    • Cool, J. (2012). Co-location: Reconfigurations of Place and Embodiment from Cyborganic to Facebook. Human No More pp. 264. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press.
    • Lutkehaus, N., Cool, J. (2004). Paradigms Lost and Found: The “Crisis of Representation” and Visual Anthropology, in Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World. pp. 116-139. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
    • Lutkehaus, N., Cool, J. (1999). Paradigms Lost and Found: The ‘Crisis of Representation’ and Visual Anthropology, in Collecting Visible Evidence. pp. 116-139. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

    Book Review

    • Cool, J. (2016). Review of: Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino, eds., Experimental Film and Anthropology. Asian Ethnology. pp. 471–474.
    • Cool, J. (2015). Review of Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday, by Christine Hine. American Ethnologist. pp. 2.
    • Cool, J. (2012). Book review: Localizing the Internet. American Anthropological Association. pp. 838-639.

    Essay

    Journal Article

    • Cool, J. (2020). Tripod: Performance, Media, Cybernetics. American Anthropologist. Vol. 122 (3), pp. 7.
    • Cool, J. (2015). Working Out the Kinks: Anonymous Subjects in Ethnographic Film. Anthropology Now. Vol. 7 (2), pp. 12.
    • Cool, J. (2014). Gardening Metadata in the New Media Ecology: a Manifesto (of sorts) for Ethnographic Film. American Anthropologist. Vol. 116 (1), pp. 14.
    • Cool, J. (2001). Strange Distance: Reading Walden in Suburbia. Ethnofoor. Vol. 14 (1), pp. 61-74.

    Magazine/Trade Publication

    • Cool, J.Mitsuru Kataoka: Communications Designer, New Media Visionary. Discover Nikkei, Japanese American National Museum. pp. 9.

    Working Paper

    • Cool, J. (1991). “Defamiliarizing Non-Mastery: Interpreting Men’s and Women’s Academic Histories at the Juncture of French and American Feminism.”. The Institute for the Study of Women and Men in Society, University of Southern California.

    Other

    • Cool, J. (2013). Film review, In the Wilderness of a Troubled Genre. General Anthropology Bulletin.
    • Cool, J. (2012). Film review, Roots of Love. American Anthropologist.
    • GESM 130: Ethnography at Work: Anthropology and the Corporate Encounter, General Education Program, 2015-2016
    • Documentary film, Home Economics: a documentary of suburbia, broadcast nationally on the P.B.S. Television Network POV series., 1994-1995
    • Online Essay, “Knowledge Transfer, Transparency, IT: An Infrastructure Report
      from Co-Chairland,” The CASTAC Blog, blog.castac.org, August 31, 2014, 2014-2015
    • Online Essay, Cool, Jennifer. “#ALSIceBucketChallenge: Templatized Self-Expression & Costless
      Communitas,” The CASTAC Blog, blog.castac.org, August 21, 2014, 2014-2015
    • Multimedia Performance, TRIPOD, or “Nobody’s Talking about That, Margaret,”
      a performance of a conversation between Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson about their work in Bali, the use of the camera in anthropology, and cybernetics. Featuring the film “Trance and Dance in Bali” and performances by Sumunar Indonesian Music and Dance Ensemble.,
    • Multimedia Performance, “Tripod: Mead, Bateson, Bali,” mixed media performance documentary, University of Colorado Boulder. Co-produced, directed, and performed with Christian Hammons.,
    • FIlm, Tripod: Feedback (14 min), a teaching film on reflexivity and cross-cultural performance featured in American Anthropologist: https://www.americananthropologist.org/online-content/tripod-performance-media-cybernetics,
    • Final Year Dissertation Fellowship, College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, USC, 2007-2008
    • USC or School/Dept Award for Teaching, Award for Excellence in Teaching, Center for Excellence in Teaching, USC, 2006-2007

  • Conferences Organized

    • Organizer, presenter, Interdisciplinary collaborations and creative connections: An Experiential Learning conference, Sixth College, University of California, San Diego., 2013-2014
    • Organizer, presenter, Society for the Social Studies of Science, Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada, 2007-2008
    • Organizer, presenter, American Anthropological Association, Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 2005-2006

    Editorships and Editorial Boards

    • Media Editor, Anthropology Now, 2014 – 2019
    • Contributing Editor, General Anthropology Division, Anthropology News (http://www.anthropology-news.org/), 2015 – 2018
    • Executive Producer, Platypus (blog.castac.org), CASTAC Blog, 2012 – 2016

    Professional Offices

    • President, General Anthropology Division, American Anthropological Association, 11/2020 – 11/2022
    • President-Elect, General Anthropology Division, American Anthropological Assn., 11/2018 – 11/2020
    • Communications Director, General Anthropology Division, American Anthropological Assn., 2015 – 2018
    • Executive Producer, blog.castac.org, Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing, 2012 – 2015
    • Co-Chair, Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing (CASTAC), General Anthropology Division, American Anthropological Association, 2009 – 2014

    Reviewer for Publications

    • American Anthropologist, American Anthropological Association, Film review, Roots of Love, by Harjant Gill. American Anthropologist. Volume 114, Number 4, December 2012, pp. 687-688., 2013-2014
    • American Ethnologist, American Anthropological Association, Book review, Localizing the Internet, by John Postill. American Ethnologist, Volume 39, Number 4, November 2012, pp. 838-839, 2012-2013
    • General Anthropology Bulletin, American Anthropological Association, Film review, In the Wilderness of a Troubled Genre, by John Bishop, General Anthropology Bulletin. Volume 20. Issue 1., 2012-2013

    Media, Alumni, and Community Relations

    • Los Angeles Times interview for story on Elliot Rodger and “incels.”, Spring 2018
    • Interview, “Reasons The Ice Bucket Challenge Went Viral,” Timothy Stenovec, The Huffington Post, August 21, 2014, Fall 2014
    • MTVnews Interview, Fear of Better Options, http://www.mtv.com/news/2001986/what-is-fomo/, Fall 2014
    • Television interview on ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, Between the Lines, Channel News Asia, August 29, 2014, Fall 2014