Books
 

• Circulating Culture: Transnational Cuban Networks of Exchange (University Press of Florida, 2023).
  
  Shortlisted for the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists First Book Prize and the Society for Latin American & Caribbean Anthropology Book Prize. Buy
  
  "Cearns' book is ethnographically dense, beautifully written, and full of surprising analytical insights" — Steffen Köhn, author of Island in the Net

 

• Contraband Cultures: Reframing Smuggling across Latin America and the Caribbean (co-edited with C. Beach, UCL Press, 2024). Download free

• Speculative Futures: Precarious Property and Shifting Values in Socialist Cuba (forthcoming, 2028)

• Intelligent Artifice — forthcoming on AI companionship, grief technology, and human–AI intimacy.

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Selected peer-reviewed articles
 

• 'AI's Anthropology Problem', Anthropology Today (guest editorial)

• 'Artificial Interlocutors: AI Chatbots, Mediated Knowledge, and the Ethnographic Encounter', Anthropology & Humanism 

• 'Ex Machina: Emotional Break-Ups and Digital Breakdown with AI Companions', Cultural Anthropology, 41(3), 2026

• 'Kinship through Code, Personhood as Node: AI Afterlives and New Technologies of the Self', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 32(1), 2025

• 'Through the Looking Glass: Heteronymic Self and Otherness in AI Therapy', Etnográfica, 29(3), 2025

• 'Divining Truth: Towards an Epistemology of AI', The Journal of Extreme Anthropology, 8(2), 2025

• 'Safeguarding Data: The Data Consensus and the Public Good in Children's Social Services' (with Hannah Knox), Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 42(1), 2024
   

Full publication list available here.​

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Editorial roles
 

• Series Editor, Anthropology & AI, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology (Oxford University Press), 2026–

• Editorial Board, Ethnos, 2025–