The book Afterlives of Data follows the curious and multiple lives that our data live once they escape our control. In Afterlives Mary F. E. Ebeling's ethnographic investigation shows how information about our health and our debt becomes biopolitical assets owned by healthcare providers, insurers, commercial data brokers, credit reporting companies, and platforms. By delving into the oceans of data built from everyday medical and debt traumas, Ebeling reveals how data about our lives affect our bodies and our life chances and wholly define us. She will be in conversation with digital privacy rights activists from the Digital Defense Fund or Mijente/Juntos.

About the Author:
Mary F.E. Ebeling Professor of Sociology and affiliate faculty at the Center for Science, Technology and Society, Drexel University. She is author of Afterlives of Data: Life and Debt Under Capitalist Surveillance (University of California Press 2022) and Healthcare and Big Data: Digital Specters and Phantom Objects (Palgrave 2016). When not agonizing in front of a blank laptop screen trying to write, she likes hearing peoples’ stories, walking along rivers and riding her bike in Philadelphia.