Sophia Goodfriend

Sophia Goodfriend is an anthropologist and journalist whose research examines AI-powered surveillance and automated warfare in Israel and Palestine. She is the Harry Frank Guggenheim Research Fellow on Violence at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, and a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University, where her dissertation, Algorithmic Dispossession: Automating Warfare in Israel and Palestine, was supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program and the National Science Foundation, and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. Her ethnographic fieldwork in Hebron documented the Israeli military’s deployment of AI-powered facial recognition cameras and biometric identification systems against Palestinians, and her reporting has traced how Israeli private-sector surveillance firms refine technologies on occupied populations before exporting them globally. Her academic writing has appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and Third World Quarterly; her journalism and essays have been published in Foreign Policy, The Intercept, the London Review of Books, +972 Magazine, Jewish Currents, and Boston Review. She is currently completing her first book manuscript. Homepage: sophiagoodfriend.com

Selected Bibliography
Goodfriend, Sophia. “Algorithmic State Violence: Automated Surveillance and Palestinian Dispossession in Hebron’s Old City.” International Journal of Middle East Studies (2023).
Goodfriend, Sophia. “Algorithmic Dissent: Militarized Platforms and Palestinian Political Imagination in Jerusalem.” Third World Quarterly (2024).