MARY FE EBELING is professor of sociology, and affiliate faculty with the Center for Science, Technology and Society and the Culture, Communication and Media program in the Graduate School at Drexel University.
I am an ethnographic sociologist who researches the intersections of marketing, health, biomedical science and digital life. My latest book Afterlives of Data: Life and Debt under Capitalist Surveillance (2022, University of California Press) will be available in June 2022 and examines how we are subjects of both data and debt. Healthcare and Big Data: Digital Specters and Phantom Objects (2016, Palgrave Macmillan) is focused on data brokers, data mining, marketing surveillance, private health data, and algorithmic identities. Over the last several years, I have become particularly passionate about “digital ontologies” and how our bodies, and the data they produce, are transformed into digital objects that live “lives of their own” in the databased society.
My work has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the European Union (5th Framework Programme).
I am so fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from people far smarter than I am, and I often collaborate with other social scientists and humanities scholars, scientists, artists, filmmakers, performers and urban farmers to reimagine presents and futures, particularly Annemarie Jutel, Mira Olson, Amy Slaton, Paolo Milani, Rachel Ellis Neyra, RAIR and Billy Dufala, Gisela Rosario Ramos, Mauro Zamora and Anita Allyn, the Mill Creek Farm in West Philadelphia. I also work with alternative art spaces and collectives, such as Beta-Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Konsthall C in Stockholm, Sweden, and several artists’ collectives in Philadelphia including Grizzly Grizzly and Vox Populi.
Mary Ebeling 