WORK
Islands of Privacy
Nippert-Eng's 2010 extension of her boundary framework into questions of surveillance, secrecy, and the negotiation of personal space in increasingly transparent environments — the methodological precursor to her AI-era work.
Islands of Privacy (University of Chicago Press, 2010) applies the boundary-work framework to the question of what people keep private and why. Through ethnographic interviews and observation, Nippert-Eng documents how individuals construct 'islands' — domains of protected information, experience, and self — within an environment increasingly organized around transparency and exposure. The book extends her earlier work on work-home boundaries into the more contested terrain of personal information, revealing that privacy, like the work-home boundary, is not a fixed condition but a continuous practice maintained through material and social means. The framework developed in this book anticipates the analytical moves her AI-era work makes: privacy is not threatened by transparent technology in general but by the systematic dismantling of the material practices through which privacy was constructed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's central insight is that privacy is not the absence of exposure but the active construction of domains of non-exposure. People practice privacy the way they practice