Anna Weichselbraun

Anthropologist, 2022-2023 Berggruen Fellow

Anna Weichselbraun is an anthropologist of knowledge, technology, and governance. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna. She holds a Ph.D. in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology from the University of Chicago, and has previously worked at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her book manuscript on the knowledge practices of nuclear safeguards inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency is under review with Cornell University Press.

At Berggruen, Anna will examine the vibrant efforts of Web3 software engineers, designers, and artists to build radically inclusive and participatory online communities and alternative economies. These efforts to reimagine the future of social and political life mediated by decentralized digital ledger technologies, she proposes, might offer productive insights for conceptualizing and designing institutional forms that scale to problems of long-term planetary governance.