Who We Are
Lyn Jeffery
Research Director, Ten-Year Forecast
Follow Lyn on Twitter: @Lynj
Lyn is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the changing social relationships emerging from the presence of new technologies in daily life. She has a special interest in immersive experience, technologies that support creative expression, personal data, and the Chinese-language Internet. Lyn works with private and public sector clients on mobility, social media, and the future of communication and collaboration.
At IFTF Lyn has worked across the Technology Horizons, Ten-Year Forecast, and Health Horizons programs, and led the Global Ethnographic Network, a multi-year ethnographic research program that experiments with reflective personal forecasting methodologies with families in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Silicon Valley, in order to integrate their voices more fully into IFTF's forecasts. Additional methodological interests include group processes for collaboration, digital ethnography, and analysis of massive qualitative micro-data.
In the mid-1990s Lyn was awarded a Fulbright doctoral dissertation grant and in 2001 she received a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where her research explored the emergence of Chinese capitalism through the lens of network marketing. In addition, she taught classes in globalization and the anthropology of contemporary China. She is the co-editor of China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture, as well as author of articles on post-socialist entrepreneurialism and Chinese network marketing. Lyn is fluent in Mandarin.
If you would like to contact Lyn please send her an email (ljeffery@iftf.org) or call her at (650) 233-9577.