Katheryn M. Detwiler is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the department of Science and Technology Studies in the School of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Stevens Institute of Technology. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from The New School for Social Research (2022), an MA in anthropology from The New School (2010), and a BA in anthropology from Lewis and Clark College (2007).

Her research explores how computational datasets are connected to land and social worlds. Through place-based ethnographic, sonic, and visual methods, she explores the ethics, politics, histories, and possibilities of contemporary data practices, including of automation and AI. Her doctoral work focused on how cutting-edge computational capacities and techniques in so-called next-generation mega-observatories in Chile’s Atacama Desert move beyond Atacama-based observatories—and beyond astronomy itself—into far-flung sites of data science innovation and experimentation. This creates new configurations of old tensions between cosmology and instrumentality, computing and prospecting, and empiricism and extraction.

Her current research and teaching interests center on the politics of automation, the empirical turn in AI, alternative histories of Big Data and computation from the Global South, and feminist, critical, and decolonial data practices. She has worked in experimental and collaborative research modalities with photographers, filmmakers, designers, and musicians to explore new methods and expressive forms for critical, creative, public scholarship.