I found it helpful when Eriksen drew the line in the sand about the fundamental questions that anthropology concerns itself with. Here’s his Big Three: 1) What is…
I would argue that the unhappy academics were creating and adding to what I described in my thesis as affective swirls of discontent, and that they were doing…
“Migration issues in Europe are a hot topic right now – it’s not news that they have been used in the last 50 years as a way to…
“Machine learning is a broad area of study, and that’s one thing you don’t see from a distance, is how broad it is. We like to do what…
This post is about the biopsychosocial medical model and how it relates to the treatment of chronic pain. As an anthropologist, I’m particularly interested in the social part…
“We were bringing the voices of people that didn’t get inside the building, inside the building and making them count. And I took that as an incredible responsibility,…
“If wine hasn’t been turned into a standardized beverage, there’s room for variation. There’s an appreciation for variation that has something to do with the taste of place.…
Bureaucracy is so deadly dull because it’s so mundane. But, as Steve Woolgar points out in his book Mundane Governance, the Latin etymology of ‘mundane’ is ‘of the…
It’s our 1st birthday in 2 weeks time (nooo, say what?? Where did that year go?) and a birthday is always a good time to take stock. Are…
“Although this stuff is very ordinary, very day-to-day, very unremarkable… it’s actually quite dangerous, too.” Steve Woolgar, emeritus professor at the Saïd School of Business…
At the end of a day of academic work, you may not want to talk to anybody else, and giving yourself that option is a form of self-care.…
Are we seeing a shift away from explicitly imagining alternatives to the status quo? Are we even still capable, as a society, of envisaging these alternative imaginaries? There…
“Rather than always studying poor, peripheral peasants, pastoralists, and fishermen, let’s turn the critical gaze of our discipline, which we do so well, let’s pivot it round like…
Outside the academy, I’m sure the perception remains that academics sit in leather armchairs, gazing out the gilded windows of our ivory towers, thinking all day. That has…
Using Mary Douglas’s notion of matter out of place, I posit that when the government changed the law and increased their negative rhetoric about foreign workers, people like…
As Helene Mialet’s ethnography examines the role of his assistants, his students, and the media in the social construction of ‘Stephen Hawking: the great genius’, she also shows…
Are you keen to understand more about what anthropologists do and why they do it? This post compiles the reasons of anthros from around the world in honour…
Although I’ve often been heard to sigh and groan that “technology hates me”, just like any other self-respecting anthropologist, in this post I want to consider just what…
I was listening to a ‘Waking Up with Sam Harris’ episode a few weeks ago, called Facing the Crowd. It has since been playing on my mind. Harris…
Questions about Exploitation and Invisible Work in Academia It is an open secret amongst academics that universities exploit the labour of their academic staff, and more importantly, that…