Erica Lagalisse is an anthropologist curious about mathematics in the social world. With the support of the Canada Council of the Arts she is now touring “Algorithm & the Web” (2026-7), a course exploring dialectics of culture and technology since 2000. The series explores how activists have used the Internet over time, and analyzes the algorithm vs. network as mental models of reality. We see how thinking with geometry creates real world effects, influencing social movement debates around class vs. identity, spectrums and binaries, intersectionality, and technology itself. “Algorithm & the Web” is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork in the UK, Europe, Canada and Mexico, and synthesizes insights from Lagalisse’s research career in political anthropology. Follow her Patreon (free) “Unpacking My Library” for dispatches.
Lagalisse was a researcher and fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE, 2017-22) while developing Occult Features of Anarchism (Stockholm University Press 2018; PM Press, 2019), and later editor (2021-3) at The Sociological Review for “Solidarity and Care during the Covid-19 Pandemic” together with Beverley Skeggs. She developed the Anthropology of Social Movements course at Fulbright University Vietnam (2023-4), after teaching The Anthropology of Latin America at McGill University (during her PhD, 2008-2017).
Lagalisse’s doctoral dissertation,“Good Politics”: Property, Intersectionality, and the Making of the Anarchist Self (McGill University, 2017), explores activist networks across Québec, the United States and Mexico to examine contradictions within indigenous solidarity activism. The ethnography throws into relief how left activists recuperate the black feminist challenge of “intersectionality” within the logic of neoliberal property relations and self-making projects (the rhizome is re-territorialized).
During her doctorate Lagalisse held a visiting researcher appointment at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social (CIESAS) in Oaxaca, Mexico (supervisor: Margarita Dalton; 2010-11), and a U.S.-Canada Fulbright Fellowship at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at the University of Texas at Austin (supervisor: Charles Hale; 2011-12). Her research has been twice supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC, 2005-10) and twice by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (FRQSC, 2010-17), as well as with a research grant (SRG) from the Leverhulme Fund (UK, 2021-3).
Lagalisse has been published in Signs – Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the Journal of Ethnobiology, Best American Essays, The Baffler and more.
See complete bibliography of popular and academic publications (including selected conference papers), many with links to source or downloadable PDF.
See information on Lagalisse’s first work of public anthropology, Occult Features of Anarchism (2018-2022), including the article, book and translations.
Academic papers currently in preparation (not yet in Bibliography):
“Property and Propriety: An Ethnography of Class and Identity” (nd.), in preparation for Anthropological Theory. [read abstract]
“From Imagenes Agentes to dt/dx: A Qualification Regarding the Origin of Calculus” (nd.), in preparation for Isis.
Contact: erica.lagalisse@mail.mcgill.ca