Zachary Sheldon
- Visiting Assistant Professor
My research draws on semiotic anthropology, world-systems ethnography, and the epistemological principle of Islamic philosophy to ask how ordinary people develop critical insights into opaque socio-technical systems. Currently, I am revising a book manuscript that draws on fieldwork in Jordan’s clandestine workplaces to understand how Iraqi migrants produce and exchange knowledge about regional markets for refugee labor and investment. In my work with dispossessed Iraqis, I ask how everyday dialogues among illicitly employed refugees can illuminate the unspoken rules of sectarian sociality, the covert connections between war and commerce, and even the playful circuits of popular board games. More recently, my interest in the relationship between predictive intelligence and linguistic interaction, which I first explored in my paper “The Malicious Game” [https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/5439], has led to a new research project studying the deep history of artificial intelligence in the Mediterranean world. This project combines computer programming, data science, and museum anthropology to trace the uncanny genealogy of computational algorithms and algebraic techniques that humans have used to simulate contact with inhuman minds for millennia. For a full list of my publication, award, presentations, and appointments, you can download my C.V.[here]