Livia Garofalo

A cultural and medical anthropologist, Livia Garofalo is a researcher with Data & Society’s Trustworthy Infrastructures program, where she focuses on the materialities and intimacies of technologies and infrastructures. She is interested in understanding how people experience and make meaning in times of crisis, how technology and AI are mobilized, and how power and subjectivity show up in everyday life. Her recent projects have examined historical and economic trauma and the delivery of critical care in Argentina; the intersection of labor, technology in psychotherapy; AI and mental health; and the community impacts of data centers in Pennsylvania. She is also currently an institutional partner of the NSF-Brown University’s AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants (ARIA). Livia earned her PhD in anthropology and a master’s in public health from Northwestern University. Her work has been funded by funded by the US Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in cultural anthropology from the University of Bologna, Italy.