Jennifer Sierra

Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities

20252026 Forum on Truth

Jennifer Sierra

Linguistic Anthropology; Digital Media

University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, 2025

Jennifer Sierra’s research explores human-machine relationships among Shipibo-Konibo people (who refer to themselves as “Shipibo”), an Indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. Drawing on insights from linguistic anthropology, Indigenous studies, critical digital media studies, and science and technology studies (STS), her work offers a nuanced cultural analysis of digital technology use and media infrastructure access in the Amazon region. Jennifer earned her Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology from the University of Michigan, where she also completed a graduate certificate in digital studies.

Bateria Keyotai Kaman (’Til the Battery Dies): The (Im)Possible Digital Life of Shipibo-Konibos in the Peruvian Amazon

This project seeks to move a dissertation into a book manuscript. This book will delve into the human-machine relationships among Shipibo-Konibos (self-referred to as "Shipibos"), an Indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest. The work provides an in-depth semiotic analysis of Shipibos’ ambivalent engagement with digital technologies and their complex relationships with internet infrastructure—in both rural and urban contexts. The project explores how these technologies become entangled with Shipibos’ epistemologies of possibility. For Shipibos, digital participation makes possible quotidian hybrid sociality that supersedes the co-presence affordances of prior communication technologies. The research pays careful attention to how Shipibos envision possibilities through digital engagement and when these technologies fail to meet expectations or present social dilemmas, rendering them imperfect and unpredictable entities. This study underscores how Indigenous Amazonian epistemologies—which reject the modernist separation between human and non-human entities—shape the agency of digital technologies. Shipibos perceive the capabilities of digital technologies as co-produced and intricately linked with ambivalent human agencies, challenging the modernist notion that such technologies inherently offer limitless opportunities.