Vita Peacock is a visiting Humboldt Fellow (2019) and a co-operation partner with For Digital Dignity, Project ONLINERPOL. She received her Ph.D in 2014 from University College London for an anthropological study of hierarchy in Germany’s Max Planck Society, and has since published a number of articles on this subject, one of which was awarded the Early Career Award by the European Association of Social Anthropologists. From 2013-2016 she was an ESRC Future Research Leaders Postdoctoral Fellow, during which she carried out extensive fieldwork on the ‘Anonymous’ movement in Britain. This research forms the basis of her forthcoming monograph, Digital Initiation Rites: The Arc of Anonymous in Britain, which undertakes a sustained comparison between processes of digitally-mediated politicization and traditional initiation rites, demonstrating how digital technologies are being inserted into recognizable initiatory sequences with profound effects.

The Humboldt Foundation fellowship awarded to Peacock marks the start of a long-term study of anti-surveillance activity in Germany,

in which she will be investigating the political and moral significance of relationships to digital data in Germany and elsewhere.