Scott MacLochlainn's research is broadly concerned with the ethical contestations emergent from the circulation of new language, media, and legal formations in the Philippines, as well as in the United States. Within these spaces (from religious difference in the Philippines, to the politics of naming, to defining kinds of death) he is fascinated by the nature of social categories and types, how they come into being, circulate, and change. Throughout my work he engages with the nature of abstraction within the social. MacLochlainn completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Before coming to Johns Hopkins University, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
MacLochlainn is currently conducting research on an ethnographic project examining the ethics and practices of abstraction around different types of death in the Philippines. Among other spaces, this project explores the collection of evidence in extrajudicial killings in Manila, the measuring of the dying of biodiversity, bureaucracies of indigenous deaths in Mindoro, and the data production around natural disasters.
His first book, The Copy Generic: How the Non-Specific Makes our Social Worlds (forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press, 2022), seeks to rethink the role of “generic” social forms. While we are seemingly surrounded by the culturally worn-out, discarded, and over-produced, this book describes how such spaces of overload and repetition have emerged as important templates and semiotic short-hands, forcing us to rethink the very nature of newness, replication, and of non-specificity. The Copy Generic moves among the ethnographic and historical spaces of Bible translation and Sign language, legal discourses on indigeneity, media and branding in Southeast Asia, Christian missionaries, as well as the postcolonial inheritances of American infrastructural design in Manila.
MacLochlainn also maintains ongoing and future oriented research interests in the emergence, consolidation, and circulation of Filipino Sign Language, natural language processing, design theory, as well as corporations and collectivities, and religious formations.
