Spencer Kaplan
Welcome! I’m a PhD student in the Yale Department of Anthropology, where I study technology, finance, and media in North America and Europe. I’m interested in how human selves are fashioned and cultivated through technology. How do cultural beliefs about what it means to be human, and what it means to be a better human, animate the designs of emergent technologies and markets? And in turn, how do technological theories and concepts shape how we understand the world and the humans inhabiting it? Besides anthropology, I engage with science and technology studies, media studies, ethics, and critical theory. My ethnographic work has brought me in contact with Wall Street bankers, art collectors, and, most recently, Berlin’s NFT enthusiasts.
My research is motivated by previous experience working in technology startups and management consulting. I received an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and a BA in International Studies and Economics from the University of Chicago.
During the 2022-2023 academic year, I am coordinating the Yale Department of Anthropology’s Ethnography and Social Theory Colloquium. I am also a Student Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project.
Contact
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Research Projects
Financializing Identities
What is “bringing your full self to work”? How have we come to see aspects of our identity, particularly those aspects that have been historically marginalized, as sources of human capital? Plenty of research on diversity and inclusion has debated its business value and whether experiences of marginality help employees perform in the workplace. I’m more interested in how the idea of diversity as a source of value makes people understand their identities and cultivate themselves in new ways. My work in this space has focused on LGBTQ-identified employees at some of Wall Street’s biggest banks.
Kaplan, S. (2022), “Bringing Your Full Self to Work”: Fashioning LGBTQ Bankers on Wall Street. Anthropology of Work Review, 43: 5-15. (Available open-access)
I also published a shorter piece on this topic in Anthropology News.
Interfaces of Art Collecting
What does it mean to collect art when today’s art markets are increasingly global, speculative, and technologically mediated? How do individuals use art collecting as a strategy of self fashioning? What kinds of selves do they present when they present their art, and what becomes of art in the process?
I am revisiting art collecting in light of surging interest in blockchain and NFTs. I followed NFTs to Berlin, where the city’s thriving art and technology scenes support an active community of NFT enthusiasts. I presented initial findings at the Web3 Workshop. There, I argued for the importance of physical place in the production and experience of virtual phenomena. You can read that talk here. Elsewhere, I have spoken about NFT communities and how they (counterintuitively) work offline to overcome problems of trust.
I first asked these questions as an undergraduate, pursuing them through research in various sites, including East Asia and the Arab Gulf, where entrepreneurs and royals make record-breaking acquisitions of European artworks. They often present their acquisitions alongside work by local artists in museums they’ve built for community members and visitors alike to view. You can find some of my writing on this here.
Spencer Kaplan 