Faculty Profile for Dr. Angela VandenBroek

Biography Section

Biography and Education

My work sits at the intersection of business anthropology, design anthropology, and science and technology studies. I am fascinated by the ways that we organize and mobilize our resources, stories, and ideas to drive social and cultural change. This interest took me to Stockholm, Sweden—known for producing more innovative, billion-dollar unicorn companies per capita than anywhere in the world (except sometimes Silicon Valley)—to study the extremely powerful and globally pervasive practice of innovation through entrepreneurship. With both a PhD in anthropology and a professional background in design and technologies, I am both excited by the possibilities of entrepreneurial innovation and critical of it’s frequent shortsightedness, capitalist constraints, and shallow understanding of humanity. I seek to harness the power of the anthropological perspective to challenge the hype around innovation. I aim to document how entrepreneurial systems and infrastructures of innovation work, for whom, and why—then contextualize that within a wider scope of human innovation to inspire innovative thinking around innovation.

In addition to my anthropological training, I have more than 20 years of professional experience outside of academic anthropology. As a first-generation college student from a low-income household, my career in higher education has been defined by the need to maintain a parallel patchwork career for subsistence. After developing skills during my BS and MA, I transitioned to a 13+ year career as an applied anthropologist. I worked primarily for non-profits (e.g., community organizations, institutions of higher education, libraries, etc.) that could not normally afford the luxury of an anthropologist on staff or contract. So, I developed a wide array of skills beyond anthropology, including web design, back-end web development, system administration, graphic design, marketing and branding, organizational strategy, and program evaluation. Both as a full-time employee and as a freelancer, I combined my anthropological research skills and expertise with these technical and artistic skills to produce anthropological-informed designs and solutions at low costs with big impacts.

Teaching Interests

Anthropological methods, ethics, and theory; Social Impact and Innovation; and Design Anthropology

Research Interests

Science and Technology Studies (STS); Feminist STS; Business Anthropology; Design anthropology; Applied Anthropology; Innovation; Entrepreneurship; Technologies; Design; Futures and Foresight; Expertise; Ignorance and Agnotology; and Infrastructure