Tom Hehir

I’m a sociocultural anthropologist employed in the ad world, working to explore media as a representation of culture. Primarily, I focus on digital and new media and am deeply interested in visual culture, social imaginaries, and disentangling the relationship between understandings and institutions.

I’ve studied, written and spoken about topics ranging from how videogames are increasingly dissolving distinctions between reality and fantasy, to a historical analysis linking Walker Evans' “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941) to the structure of the Agricultural industry in the US, from the economic implications of immaterial labor and the exchange of affect as a commodity, to issues of representing identity and body in non-representational media. Oh, and I can explain all that to your client without scaring them from the room or putting them to sleep.

The ultimate goal of my work is to disentangle the reflexive process by which social institutions and the understandings of individuals produce, corroborate, and transform one another, thereby creating a stable, yet not static culture. I believe the study of media is key to answering the question of “how culture evolves?”