Alexa Hagerty

Alexa Hagerty is an Affiliate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

Alexa is an anthropologist researching human rights and technology. She is particularly interested in activism and how communities resist, refuse, and re-imagine technologies.

Her work examines the use forensic and biometric technologies in humanitarian interventions, such as identifying the dead in the aftermath of political violence in Latin America and the current war in Ukraine. She also uses ethnographic, participatory, and arts-based approaches to analyse the human rights implications of prediction and surveillance in public health technologies.

In addition to academic publications, Dr Hagerty has written for Wired and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her research has been featured at Mozilla Fest, Palais de Tokyo, Deutsches Hygiene‑Museum and covered by news outlets including The New York Times and The Guardian.

She is the author of Still Life with Bones: Genocide, forensics, and what remains (Penguin Random House, 2023). She holds a PhD from Stanford University.