Julien Porquet

I’m a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist currently finishing a PhD in the Social Anthropology department of the University of Cambridge.

I study the political economy and social epistemology of visual perception in contexts where technology increasingly mediates how people look together and against each other.

On Looking
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Articles

Copying style, Extracting value: Illustrators' Perception of AI Style Transfer and its Impact on Creative Labor. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-16. 2025. (With Sitong Wang, and Lydia B. Chilton.)

How to do things with style: A pragmatic history of style as a site for debates about authorship, commodification and technological reproducibility. Journal of Illustration 12, no. 1 (2025): 67-86.

In the Wake of Brands: Contested Repertoires, Dis-enregisterment, and Generic Personhood Among Illustrators. Under review for a special issue with Signs & Society

Public Writing

Why creative labour isn’t always seen as “real work” – and what that means for artists and designers. It’s Nice That, 2024

If You’re Worried About DALL·E Replacing Illustrators, You Don’t Understand The Power of Illustration. Eye On Design, 2022

What the Think Pieces About “Corporate Memphis” Tell Us About the State of Illustration. Eye On Design, 2021

Religion et nationalisme: les cas de blasphème en Birmanie. L’Asie en 1000 mots, 2017 (Winner of best student essay)

Film, Photography, and the Contemporary Museum. Cultural Anthropology, Visual and New Media Review, 2017