Jarrett Zigon
Jarrett Zigon is a social theorist, philosopher and anthropologist at the University of Virginia, where he is the William & Linda Porterfield Chair in Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology. From 2018 to 2020, he was the founding director of the Center for Data Ethics and Justice at the University of Virginia. Previously, he had been at the University of Amsterdam and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Biography. Zigon received an M.A. in liberal arts from St. John's College (1998) and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the City University of New York, Graduate Center (2006). He subsequently  was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a visiting scholar at Columbia University, and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. His research has been funded through a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and the European Research Council (ERC), among others. Research. Zigon is best known for his writing on ethics and political theory – most particularly for his conceptions of moral breakdown, moral assemblages, attunement, dwelling, and relational ethics. These writings have primarily addressed the topics of the war on drugs, social and political change, and artificial intelligence /data science. Zigon's work has had a major influence on the anthropology of ethics, and critical phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches to ethics and politics. Zigon is committed to an ongoing conversation between anthropology and philosophy. He is particularly recognized for articulating an anthropology strongly influenced by post-Heideggerian continental philosophy and critical theory, the theoretical articulation of which he describes as critical hermeneutics. He has contributed several articles to openDemocracy on addiction, the war on drugs, and political activism.