Book Talk | Webb Keane | Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Wednesday, March 5th at 5:30 PM for a book talk with Webb Keane. He will discuss his new book Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination with Gideon Lewis-Krause and Natasha Schüll.

Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is affiliated with the Social-Cultural and the Linguistic subfields in the Anthropology Department, as well as the Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a visiting fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, twice a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and has taught at the School for Criticism and Theory, Cornell.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus, a staff writer at The New Yorker, grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Stanford. He writes reportage and criticism and is the author of the digressive travel memoir A Sense of Direction as well as the Kindle Single No Exit. Previously, he was a writer-at-large at the New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, and a contributing writer at WIRED magazine. Gideon co-edited, with Arnie Eisen, Philip Rieff’s Sacred Order/Social Order III, and edited Richard Rorty’s Philosophy as Cultural Politics. He teaches a reporting seminar in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia. He has lived in San Francisco, Berlin (where he was a 2007–8 Fulbright Fellow), and Shanghai, and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two small children.

Natasha Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her work explores the psychic life of technology with a focus on themes of addiction, anxiety, and affect modulation. Her 2012 book, ADDICTION BY DESIGN: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press 2012), parses the intimate relationship between the experience of gambling addiction and casino industry design tactics, showing how architectural, atmospheric, ergonomic, audiovisual, and algorithmic-computational techniques are marshaled to suspend — and monetize — gamblers’ attention. Her current book project, KEEPING TRACK (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, under contract), explores the rise of sensor-based, digital technologies of the self and the new modes of self-care and self-regulation they offer. Her documentary film, BUFFET: All You Can Eat Las Vegas, has screened multiple times on PBS and appeared in numerous film festivals.