Harvard Professor to Present Social Science Seminar

Please join us on Tuesday, Feb. 10 at 4 p.m. in the Reilley Room for the second talk in the spring 2026 Social Science Seminar Series. Gabriella Coleman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology and faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University will discuss “How Anonymous (barely) dodged the cyber-terrorism bullet”

This talk examines how Anonymous – despite a sustained hacking campaign that involved disruption, arrests, and even sabotage – largely avoided being successfully labeled as cyber-extremists or terrorists. Drawing on long-term anthropological fieldwork and a recursive return to that material, I show how features that once seemed incidental later proved decisive. In 2012, even as the National Security Agency portrayed Anonymous as a serious security threat, the group was simultaneously embraced in popular culture, from Hollywood films and television to ballet. Seen recursively, this pairing raises an anthropological question about how legitimacy is produced, stabilized, and rendered recognizable over time. I argue that this reputational immunity was not accidental but emerged through Anonymous’s embrace of humor, fortuitous timing alongside the 2011 social movements, and above all the Guy Fawkes mask, which inadvertently became a powerful symbolic shield. Briefly tracing the mask’s and figure’s shift from treasonous villain to pop-cultural antihero, I show how its protective power arose from the slow accumulation of meaning, made visible only through recursive return across media, politics, and everyday use. More broadly, the talk highlights anthropology’s distinctive strength: its capacity to reveal how cultural and symbolic forms shift and sediment, and in doing so help determine what counts as legitimate or illegitimate political activity.

The Social Science Seminar Series is sponsored by the social science departments: anthropology, criminology and sociology; economics; political science; and psychology.