Current Research
My interest in the anthropology of mediation guides the current project I have recently started after my dissertation fieldwork. In this research, still in its early stages, I am working with technicians at an auto body shop in Minneapolis to learn about their notion of skill and their relations with their tools. I am especially interested in how they incorporate tools into their body schema and make them part of their repertoire of motor and perceptual skills. In line with my research on blogging, I am looking at not only how tools are an extension of auto body workers’ mental and motor abilities helping them do their work, but how the tools also shape those abilities.