Erica Robles-Anderson

Erica Robles-Anderson is writing a trilogy about U.S. conservative religious technocultures. Drawing on original archival and field research gathered over the past fifteen years, these books will trace the rise of megachurches, multi-level marketing, and classical homeschools as coordinated organizational innovations. Robles-Anderson was trained as a cultural historian, experimental psychologist, and design researcher, and she is interested in forms of collective life in network society. Behind dominant discourses about technology, she argues, is an implicit individualism that under-recognizes how cultural narratives shape technological regimes. Her work challenges this tendency by focusing on institutions for social reproduction – schools, churches, and households —as drivers of change.

Robles-Anderson is an associate professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, with affiliation in Religious Studies. She was awarded the Mahoney Prize (with Patrik Svensson) for outstanding article about computing.

Robles-Anderson co-founded the OIKOS working group on kinship/economy, is a member of the CASBS Summer Institute on Organizations and Their Effectiveness, and is a research advisor for the Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force, the largest public media history initiative in the U.S. She is Editor-in-Chief (with Arjun Appadurai and Vyjayanthi Rao) of Public Culture, an award-winning journal for transnational studies of culture.