About

Karen Gregory is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her interests are ethnography, contemporary social theory, and the sociology of labor. Her dissertation, entitled “Enchanted Entrepreneurs: The Labor of Psychics in New York City”, is an ethnographic account of the labor of alternative practitioners and is drawn from two years of work at an esoteric school in the city. Her dissertation explores the intersection of contemporary spirituality, labor, and social media.

Karen is also an Instructional Technology Fellow at the Macaulay Honors College (Hunter College) and is currently an adjunct lecturer in the Labor Studies Department of Queens College. Karen has also held a Teaching and Learning Fellowship in the Office of General Education at Queens College, as well as a Writing Fellowship at LaGuardia Community College. Karen has several years of teaching experience and is also a photographer. She is deeply committed to experimental pedagogies that explore the relationships between teaching, learning, and “making things” in the classroom.

Most recently, she helped found the CUNY Graduate Center’s Digital Labor Working Group http://digitallabor.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ and co-coordinated “The Life of Things” Center for Humanities seminar at the Graduate Center: http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars/life-things-big-data

Karen is currently at work on an on-line project that theorizes and experiments with writing as a mode of sociological thought in the age of “Big Data”, as well as what it means to conduct ethnography in what has been called a “flat ontology”, or world populated by both human and more-than-human actors.

For more information, including links to writing and publications and CV, please see: 

http://opencuny.org/karengregory/