Fiona Greenland
· Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Department ChairVerifiedUniversity of Virginia · Global Policy Studies
Active 2006–2025
About
Fiona Greenland is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia's Department of Global Studies. Her research interests include state formation, social theory, science and technology studies, nationalism, sociology of culture, archaeology, art/science studies, and ethnographic methods. She has contributed to these fields through various publications, exploring topics such as materiality and consecration, material culture and agency, artifact trafficking, nationalism, and the cultural significance of artifacts and monuments. Her work often examines the intersection of material culture with social and political processes, providing insights into how objects and symbols influence societal identities and national narratives.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Computer Science
- Sociology
- Artificial Intelligence
- Philosophy
- Law
- Epistemology
- Linguistics
- Business
- Aesthetics
- Public relations
- Knowledge management
- Economics
- Engineering ethics
- Art
- Engineering
Selected publications
:<i>Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe</i>
The Journal of Modern History · 2025-08-27
article1st authorCorresponding:<i>Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites</i>
American Journal of Sociology · 2024-03-01
article1st authorCorresponding2024-12-02
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingOwning Color: The Visual as Property
Contexts · 2023-11-01
articleOpen accessSenior authorWho has the right to claim color? Through three chromatic cases—International Klein Blue, Vantablack, and Pullman, or UPS Brown—the authors explore the social significance of and commercial demands upon the vividly colorful world we all share.
Pixel politics and satellite interpretation in the Syrian war
Media Culture & Society · 2022 · 5 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Artificial Intelligence
- Computer Science
The pixel is a fundamental element of contemporary visual culture, with pictorial and perceptual properties that affect the interpretation of the digital composition as a whole. Despite its importance, however, the pixel remains a neglected object of analysis in cultural sociology and critical media studies. To advance a framework of pixel studies I present a hermeneutical approach. Empirically, I focus on the pixel’s political and socio-technical dimensions through satellite images of violence in the Syrian conflict zone (2011–2017). Through interviews and observations, I study the satellite programmers, technicians, archeologists, and anthropologists who comprised an interdisciplinary effort to interpret satellite pictures of archeological damage and other forms of cultural violence during the war. Their interpretations, some of which were the basis for consequential decisions by US policymakers, involved isolating as few as two pixels on the screen. To explain what this entailed, I draw on theories from Alberto Romele and Don Ihde to situate the pixel within a hermeneutic circle through which satellite images were ‘read’ at different levels. My findings have implications for broader sociological and media studies critiques of the epistemic status of digital media in light of their deep interrelations of politics, technology, and people.
Review of “How Green Became Good. Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens”
Social Forces · 2022-07-24
article1st authorCorrespondingHow Green Became Good is a powerful work of urban sociology, culture, and historical and comparative methods. In it, Hillary Angelo challenges conventional accounts of why urban greening became a public good. Urban greening is “the normative practice of using everyday signifiers of nature to fix problems with urbanism” (3). Today, it is a popular policy that includes a range of practices: urban farms, sidewalk planters and trees, community gardens, and pocket parks. Why did the idea that greener cities are better cities become naturalized as everyday common sense (4)? To answer this question, Angelo argues, we need to look beyond morphology and towards urbanized nature a key facet of social imagination whereby community members and their leaders read themselves into broader sets of relationships with other municipalities and their perceived strengths. By tracing the case of urban greening in the Ruhr valley in Germany, Angelo shows how greening involves practices and ideas that construct not just physical spaces, but entire social imaginaries. In this account, nature is a public good that is held in tension with consumer goods or, more broadly, economic production needs. But as she points out, these things are not opposites—public “green” on the one hand, private “greed” on the other. On the contrary, they are mutually constitutive. One of Angelo’s crucial analytical moves is to shift away from the idea that urbanized nature is an inherently contentious politics, and toward a socio-cultural reimagining of how a city continually makes itself “modern” by subtly changing its position with respect to a salient public good.
2022-01-01
book-chapterSenior authorCorrespondingFingerprinting, civil codes, and the origins of surveillance culture in the United States
American Journal of Cultural Sociology · 2022-04-28
article1st authorCorrespondingCollaborative Practices in Crisis Science: Interdisciplinary Research Challenges and the Syrian War
Sociological Science · 2021 · 10 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Computer Science
Crises present the scientific community with unusual demands, including the need for rapid solutions. This can translate into a greatly compressed time frame that curtails data collection and analysis procedures used in 'normal' science. Researchers cope with these demands, while maintaining professional standards and a personal commitment to producing reliable work, by engaging in what we call performed separations. These are practices that allow people to adopt an ethical epistemic position while operating within constrained and urgent research situations. We distill the core features and effects of performed separations in the case of experts working to study archaeological looting in wartime Syria. We look specifically at how different practices of control allow for varying degrees of separation and the production of knowledge claims. By extension, performed separations facilitate making ethical claims about one’s role in the production of research and use of findings.
2021-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Cultural power is the ability of a polity to extend its influence and authority through artistic and historic practices and objects. It is a capacity found throughout the world, and yet has a unique manifestation in modern Italy. This chapter presents an overview of the development and content of the Italian model of cultural heritage, which is characterized by an activist government, multi-level law enforcement, domestic and international surveillance, and a highly visible media campaign that creatively amplifies the state's cultural claims. A key feature of the model is its tolerance for internal cultural dissension, including tomb robbers (tombaroli). Tomb robbers are inadvertent participants in the distribution of state sovereignty through their looting and smuggling activities.
Recent grants
RR Standard Grant: Remote Sensing and the Rise of Conflict Archaeology
NSF · $246k · 2018–2022
Frequent coauthors
- 7 shared
Tasha Vorderstrasse
- 7 shared
Oya Topçuoğlu
- 7 shared
James Marrone
- 3 shared
Fatma Müge Göçek
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
- 2 shared
George Steinmetz
- 2 shared
Amy Whitaker
New York University
- 1 shared
Lisa M. Stulberg
New York University
- 1 shared
Gary Alan Fine
Northwestern University
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