Karin D. Knorr Cetina

Karin Knorr Cetina is the Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, Sociology, and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Knorr Cetina is interested in financial markets, knowledge and information, as well as in globalization, theory and culture. Her current projects include a book on global foreign exchange markets and on post-social knowledge societies. She continues to do research on the information architecture of financial markets, on their "global microstructures" (the global social and cultural form these markets take) and on trader markets in contrast to producer markets. She also studies globalization from a microsociological perspective, using an ethnographic approach, and she continues to be interested in "laboratory studies," the study of science, technology and information at the site of knowledge production - particularly in the life sciences and in particle physics.

Knorr Cetina is interested in dissertations having to do with finance and markets, science, and information, and globalization and post-social theory, that is attempts to theorize the role of (material, epistemic, consumer, artificial) objects in social life. Current dissertation students work, for example, on global debt relief technologies and software systems produced within the framework of international organizations, and on the conception, use and production of social robots in different countries. These students use an ethnographic approach to better understand the theoretical and cultural construction and the various dimensions of the respective domains.