Andrew McGrath

My name is Andrew McGrath and I am a 7th year PhD candidate on the cusp of finishing my degree in the University of California Irvine Department of Anthropology. I hold both a BA and MA in anthropology from the University of Cincinnati. My interests circulate through visual culture, cultural theory, ethnography, and digital anthropology. My concentration has been centered on the influence of digital acceleration, especially predictive analytics, in shaping the lives of everyday working-class and middle-class people in the United States. In addition to anthropology, I have years of experience working in the social services world, doing casework related to unhoused communities, addiction, and mental health with an emphasis on harm reduction and Housing First principles. I have been an adjunct lecturer in the Chapman University Department of Sociology since 2019. There I have taught multiple iterations of seminars on visual culture studies, new media studies, and anthropological theory.

https://uci.academia.edu/AndrewMcGrath

Research

My anthropological research has centered on how social groups conceive of, pragmatically manifest, or otherwise cognitively map shared social imaginaries in the shadow of digital acceleration. My dissertation is based on field work carried out in the Inland Empire of Southern California between 2020 and 2022. There I engaged in long term participant observation, amongst other ethnographic methods, with groups of young adults historically tethered through kinship and geolocation to both the working and middle-classes. I spent time working in an Amazon fulfillment center as a "picker", and then I spent more time as a "final mile" delivery driver, working for a subsidiary of Amazon Corp. Finally, I spent my time following and interviewing so-called lifestyle influencers, starting before the lockdown and continuing on until the orders were lifted. My goal was to understand how digital integration has changed notions of value and labor during Covid and beyond. My future research, while still somewhat vague, will center on how communities associated with social media platforms interpret material science as a set of onto-epistemic frameworks to explain their supernatural cosmologiical orientations. In particular, I am interested in how so-called paranormal investigators leverage material science and objectivity as an aesthetics and foundation for cultivating their mythologies.