Mary Ebeling is associate professor of sociology and director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Drexel University. Mary is an ethnographic sociologist and researches the intersections of marketing, health, biomedical science and digital life. Her new book, Healthcare and Big Data: Digital Specters and Phantom Objects (2016, Palgrave Macmillan) is focused on data brokers, data mining, marketing surveillance, private health data, and algorithmic identities.
Her work has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the European Union (5th Framework Programme). She has been awarded a Regional Faculty Fellowship at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania for the 2017-18 academic year.
She collaborates with scientists, artists and urban farmers to reimagine presents and futures, particularly Paolo Milani, Rachel Ellis Neyra, RAIR, the Mill Creek Farm in West Philadelphia and alternative art spaces and collectives, such as Beta-Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Konsthall C in Stockholm, Sweden, and several artists’ collectives in Philadelphia including Grizzly Grizzly and Vox Populi.