Jelena Karanovic

Jelena Karanovic teaches courses about digital and global media in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her research interests are in the anthropology of media and anthropology of science and technology, focusing on transnational cultures, ethnographic methods online, new media practices and advocacy, communication and information rights, France and Europe. Jelena's book manuscript, in preparation, explores the cultural construction of digital media through an ethnographic study of free software advocacy in France. She draws on twenty months of fieldwork conducted online and offline in 2004 and 2005 to analyze how prime vehicles of “free-market” globalization—intellectual property law and digital media technologies—have served to invigorate public debates about European integration and the transnational political economy. By relying on participant observation, she incorporates the experiences and dilemmas of free software advocates as they redraw the lines between public and private and reinvent civic engagement around digital media. Shesituates practices of participatory media advocacy at the intersection of several fields of research. She re-examine interdisciplinary debates about media and globalization by drawing on ethnographic studies of media. In conversation with scholars in science and technology studies, she explores the role of social movements in redefining the cultural place of technology and the dilemmas of facilitating democratic engagement in expert fields such as software engineering and intellectual property law. She also contributes to debates in interdisciplinary European studies by arguing that information technology and intellectual property law operate as emergent frameworks for contentious European projects. Her work highlights the divergent and often contentious terms on which people across the world use digital media technologies, suggesting that particular cultural and historical contexts provide one key to understanding global digital infrastructures.

Adjunct Assistant Professor
Department of Media, Culture and Communication
New York University