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Damien Stankiewicz

Damien Stankiewicz standing outside behind some building smiling and staring into the camera

Damien Stankiewicz

  • College of Liberal Arts

    • Anthropology

      • Associate Professor

      • Affiliated Faculty

        Programs

        • Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies
        • Global Studies

Expertise

Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Media, Digital Anthropology, Digital Methods, Artificial Intelligence, Political Anthropology, Far-right Politics, Nationalism, France, Europe

Biography

Damien Stankiewicz is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology. His research examines collective, national, and political identities in Europe, principally France. He focuses especially on the role that media play in (re)configurations of borders and belonging as the nation-state and national identity are unmade and remade through multidirectional pressures of globalization, populism, and nativism. His first book, Europe Un-Imagined (U Toronto Press, 2017) examines how staff at ARTE—a self-consciously transnational television channel located on the French-German border—went about crafting media intended to cultivate a trans-border European identity. His current research focuses on the French far-right and the intersections between face-to-face politics and digital politics, as well as the implications of artificial intelligence (and especially chatbots like ChatGPT) for everyday people in small-town southern France alongside a nascent rural-urban AI digital divide. Stankiewicz received his BA from the University of Chicago (2003), and his Certificate in Culture and Media (2006) and PhD (2011) from New York University.

Selected Publications

  • "AI and the Anti-Politics of the French Far-Right: Ethnographic Approaches to a Floating Signifier.” In preparation for Social Anthropology Forum, “AI and the Shifting Terrain of Mediation" (expected 2026)
  • Stankiewicz, Damien. 2025. “In/visible politics: Online-offline world-making of the French far-right.” Anthropological Theory. Advance online publication. 
  • Stankiewicz, Damien. 2024. “Comment” on “Ethnographic Betrayals: Secrecy, Loyalty, and Sovereignty in the Field,” Salih Can Aciksoz. Current Anthropology 65.S26.
  • "Nationalism Without Borders: Contradictory Politics at a Transborder European Media Organization." American Ethnologist 44(4). November 2017.
  • "Against Imagination: On the Ambiguities of a Composite Concept.” American Anthropologist 118(4): 796-810. December 2016.
  • “Europe.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Ed. John Jackson. New York: Oxford University Press. May 2016.
  • “The Politics of Cartoon in Anthropological Context: Charlie Hebdo and the Legibility of Genre,” Contemporary French Civilization, Special Issue: The Impossible Subject of Charlie Hebdo. May 2016.
  • Europe Un-Imagined: Nation and Culture at a French-German Television Channel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.

Courses Taught

  • Anthropology of Mass Media
  • Introduction to Production of Anthropological Media
  • Public Culture
  • Ethnographic Film and Media
  • Anthropologies of Europe and the West
  • Representing Race

Media Mentions