Alexa Hagerty
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"Alexa Hagerty is an anthropologist and writer whose work explores the intersections of technology, ethics, and human rights. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University and is currently an affiliated researcher at the University of Cambridge, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy. Dr. Hagerty's research examines how emerging technologies, particularly AI systems, reshape social dynamics, structures of power, and ethical landscapes, especially in contexts of historical marginalization and social vulnerability.
She is the recipient of the 2024 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. Her work on the “forensic turn” in human rights lays the foundation for her current research on the “algorithmic turn,” exploring the necropolitical potential of AI systems, themes of digital ethics, and the transformation of grief and mourning practices in the digital age.
In september 2024, she joins the Paris IAS for a one-month research residency.
Research Interests
Human Rights, necropolitics, phenomenology of grief and mourning, ontological fluidity, anthropology of AI, critical data ethics
Ghosts in the machine: AI, mourning, and the politics of digital death
This research project explores the evolving landscape of grief and mourning in contemporary society, with a particular focus on how emerging technologies are reshaping our relationship with death, memory, political power, and the afterlife. Drawing on anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), and history, the study examines diverse mourning practices across cultures and historical periods, culminating in an analysis of "digital necromancy" - the use of AI and other advanced technologies to recreate or communicate with the deceased. Special attention is given to the emergence of AI-powered "ghostbots" and political deepfakes, and their implications for our understanding of loss, commemoration, and affective bonds.
This research engages with critical questions of human rights and necropolitics in the digital age, analyzing the power dynamics inherent in who controls and curates digital afterlives. It explores how ghostbots can serve as both private and public forms of digital resurrection. The study addresses the phenomenon of AI-generated "deepfakes" and the revival of personas of deceased political leaders, with implications for authoritarian uses and the manipulation of historical narratives, drawing on Katherine Verdery's concept of the "political lives of dead bodies."
By situating these technological developments within the context of the Anthropocene, the research also considers how new forms of digital mourning and digital manipulation intersect with contemporary anxieties about environmental crisis. This interdisciplinary approach employs theoretical frameworks from phenomenology, media theory, and critical data studies to contribute to ongoing discussions about the ethics of AI, the future of human-technology interactions, and the changing nature of grief in the 21st century.
Key publications
Hagerty, A., Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains, Penguin Random House, 2023.
Hagerty, A., Jemio, D., & Aranda, F., "Predictive Puericulture: Algorithmic Interventions in Teenage Pregnancy", British Journal for the History of Science, 2023 .
Hagerty, A, "The Melancholy of Bones: Forensic Exhumation as an Elegiac Transformative Experience. Ethos", Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 2022.
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