Michelle Venetucci is an anthropologist who focuses on economic anthropology and corporations, studying the technology industry in the San Francisco Bay Area. After leaving her corporate job in the tech sector in San Francisco at the height of the techlash, her research is situated in a post-techlash Silicon Valley and asks why sustained public critique didn’t translate into social and material change. Approaching the industry as a collective financial project as opposed to a collection of technology projects, her research directs attention towards the structural conditions that shape the outcomes and societal impacts of these corporations.

Engaging with both the home and workplace as relational spaces of social reproduction that feed into corporate production, her dissertation, titled Stuck in Silicon Suburbia: Privileged Positionalities and Constrained Materialities in Silicon Valley, explores how industry data collection practices are substantiated and normalized through property frameworks that condition the socioeconomic relations of marriage, home ownership, and child rearing. Departing from public narratives about techno-utopian ideologies and innovation-obsessed subjects, this project argues that middle class expectations condition the continued participation of industry professionals in corporate projects that produce outcomes of inequality, addressing questions about agency and privilege, whiteness and property, and innovation and maintenance.

She holds a bachelor’s in anthropology and urban planning from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a MPhil in anthropology from Yale. She's currently a PhD candidate in the Yale anthropology department. Sometimes she does fiber arts.

Contact

michelle.venetucci@yale.edu / GitHub / Instagram / Twitter / LinkedIn

Site setup

This is a Jekyll site hosted by GitHub Pages. You can view the source code here.