Karem Said

I treat the study of digital infrastructures as a project for making the invisible plain to see and as a means for doing urban anthropology with attention to difference and inequality in online relationships. My ethnographic approach calls for apprehending the emplaced specificity of digital engagement and the material transformation of infrastructures, such as upon urban form.

My first book project documents the post-revolutionary spread of digital infrastructures along the northwestern periphery of Tunis. The research tracks how digital infrastructures incorporated existing relationships, establishing local digital traffic, even as these residents engaged expansive, international worlds. As a form of pronounced, regulated difference, gender structurally scripts how people use the internet in my field site and the ways this usage is perceived.

More broadly, I am interested to ethnographically unravel status quo presumptions about human-computing relations so as to better position popular, decolonial claims to technologies. My critical, feminist inclinations find value in artful making and doing, techne as craft, and how ordinary people use the internet to alter materiality. I am also interested in environmental and food justice forged through ethnographic reassessment of ecology; collaborative writing projects; and community art as a form of anthropological praxis.