value, economic anthropology, markets, taste, aesthetics, expertise, craft

South Asia, Sri Lanka

Alexios is a post-doctoral researcher at the department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), at the University of Zurich. Prior to joining ISEK, he studied anthropology in Athens, Paris, and New York, and received his PhD from The New School for Social Research in Fall 2018. The focus of his ethnographic research is the Ceylon Tea industry; he conducted fieldwork in Sri Lanka among professional tea-tasters, traders, producers, and workers. His research asks how taste judgments are made and shared in market contexts and how value is produced through practices of discernment.

Besides anthropology, Alexios has previously ventured into the artworld: in Athens, he interned at the Frissiras Museum for Contemporary European Painting and in 2009 he participated in the 2^nd Athens Art Biennial “Heaven LIVE”. At The New School, he taught courses in anthropology, food studies, and design and was a doctoral fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography and Social Thought. In the future, Alexios hopes to explore how machine learning and artificial intelligence might reconfigure the judging and sharing of taste, and the role of tastemakers and experts.