By Emma Louise Backe In year marked by monumental legal cases against abusive men—Gisèle Pelicot in France, Cassie’s lawsuit against former partner Sean “Diddy” Combs—America re-elected a proud…
By Emma Louise Backe When War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) concluded, Caesar had successfully led his people to a place where they might be able…
By Emma Louise Backe Wanda by César Castillo Marquez Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is essentially a horror movie with the trappings of Marvel’s characteristic action…
Believe it or not, we started 2020 with the proposition of Hope-Punk, the possibilities that could emerge through the disposition of hope. Throughout this year, we’ve explored how…
[Content and spoiler warning: This piece discusses key plot points from the film Midsommar and includes descriptions of suicide and racial violence.] When the five main characters of…
By Kai Blevins I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference…
By Steven Dashiell As COVID-19 makes videoconferencing more normative, one sociologist examines who much work goes into what we see, and don’t see, in the webcam image. The…
By Devin Proctor It’s a weird time, yes? Many of us (anthropologists) are teasing out the nuances between synchronous and asynchronous class meetings, dealing with the horror of…
By Haley Bryant The Maze on Kissy’s scalp HBO’s 2016 reboot of the 1970’s sci-fi film Westworld is not only one of the most visually interesting television programs…
By Holly Walters “Sherlock Holmes was the first fictional creation adults openly embraced as “real,” while deliberately ignoring or minimizing its creator, and this fetishization has continued for…
By Emma Louise Backe Avengers: Infinity War (2018)—the penultimate movie in the Avengers Marvel franchise—ended in defeat, the assorted heroes unable to stop Thanos from using the Infinity…
The lasting impact of Avengers: Endgame on our understandings of heroism, masculinity, and mental health. By Emma Louise Backe An hour before I walked in to see Avengers: Endgame,…
By Catherine Hill Anyone who has a passable knowledge of the works of novelist HP Lovecraft is probably aware of the prominent role that archaeology and intrepid archaeologists…
In April of 2018, as cosplayers, geeks, and comic vendors descended on the Walter Washington Memorial Convention Center in Washington, DC for the annual Awesome Con, affiliates of…
By Emma Louise Backe In February 2018, Guillermo del Toro was awarded the Oscar for The Shape Of Water, an interspecies period romance premised on inverting the horror…
Like the maelstrom of political media, 2018 was also an eventful year for anthropology. Anthropology Twitter was kept occupied with conversations about the rejection of an apolitical research…
Struggling with what to get friends or family members this holiday season? Don’t know what to ask for yourself (apart from a device that will help you get…
How does the genre of weird fiction provide the destabilizing framework for the future of HAUtalk? The HAU controversy is a dense teratoma,[1] a complicated intermingling of issues…
By Jennifer Trivedi The zombies were everywhere – on televisions and film screens, in books and online searches, at doors in October. And they caught my attention. I…
By Cindee Calton “Seriously, Star Wars? Again?” was the exact phrase that ran through my mind the first time Dryden Vos appeared on screen during my first viewing…
By Logan A. Kirkland & Joshua W. Rivers “Culture,” so-called, is implanted in nature; the environment, or Umwelt, is a model generated by the organism. Semiosis links them.” -Thomas…
By Esther R. Anderson Kaiju are giant monsters that can be seen causing filmic chaos without apparent cause or motive. As genetically-engineered creatures, aliens, or remnants of a…
By Emma Louise Backe Dolores Abernathy—titular host in HBO’s Westworld series—spends most of the second season with a gun on her hip and a constellation of blood spattering…
By Savannah Mandel Have you ever seen Elysium? It’s a 2013 science fiction movie directed by Neill Blomkamp about a future Earth where the elitist upper echelon of…