As anthropologists work with collaborators in evoking alternatives to capitalist fascisms, they increasingly engage multimodal registers; games, design, graphic novels and sou…
Matt Durington and I had a wonderful time giving a talk at UBC Okanagan. Thanks to Dr. Fiona McDonald and the Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab. Multimodal…
An article in the Baltimore Banner by Rona Kobell (https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/local-news/hampton-national-historic-site-east-towson-URF5WGM5TZCAZMJAZBGRU7JYMY/) reminded me about the…
CFP: AAA 2025 13 Ghosts of Multimodality: Critiquing, Rejecting and Learning to Live with Multimodality’s Problems Panel Organizer: Samuel Collins (scoll…
I continue to wrestle with the legacy of cybernetics in anthropology – and a future premised on an anthropological bases for the digital. https://histanthro.org/notes/communication-without-…
What are faculty thinking about generative AI? In my role at our faculty center, I speak to faculty often on the problems they face teaching in the…
By Own screenshot, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26632754 I watch people on the Seoul subway playing 쿠키런 (Cookie Run) while we barrel towards Chongno. It’s the successful coloniz…
You’ll see them in film, k-dramas, music videos, webtoons and video games: narrow Seoul alleys (골목길), old restaurants with peeling wallpaper, protagonists drown…
Today (April 26, 2024), our book, “Multimodal Methods in Anthropology” is released into the world. Here’s a song I’ve created for the moment using Udio, a text-to-song Generative…
In 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace sent a breathless letter to his friend and colleague, Thomas Huxley, inviting Huxley to join him in exploring a “new branch of anthropology”:…
My contribution to a really interesting issue on science fiction and the future in Rivista di antropologia contemporanea (2023). Abtsract: Science fiction and anthropology are separate projects,…
[From the SETI project, “A Sign in Space” (https://asignin.space/)] “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of…
Here’s a recent conference abstract submission, prompted in large part by Geoghegan’s 2022 “Code: From Information Theory to French Theory” (Duke, 2023). The characteristics of our digital world—algo…
I published this review with “TheGeekAnthropologist” – such an interesting, important blog! Please click on the link to see the review in its entirety. Book Review: Played Out…
In 2011, we started a project entitled “Anthropology By the Wire” with participants drawn mainly from community colleges in the Baltimore area. Our goal was to collaborate with…
In 1866, Alfred Russell Wallace proclaimed a “new branch of anthropology” premised on the Spiritualist movement that was then exploding in popularity in England. For Wallace, that anthropology…
Margaret Mead Imagined Different Futures By Samuel Gerald Collins In the face of climate disaster, a continuing pandemic, and endless global conflict, it’s difficult to be optimistic about…
Anthropologist Margaret Mead (center), actor Robert Redford (left), and historian Lola Van Wagenen (right) attend “A Future With Alternatives,” a symposium held in 1978 in New York City.…
The American Anthropological Annual Meeting has come and gone after a year hiatus. But, courtesy of the continued pandemic, it was not business as usual, and a combination…
For many of us in anthropology, the advent of “big data” represents a threat. Why, after all, spend months developing rapport and interviewing 100 people when you can…
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: sentiment analyses of new connections and communities in a COVID world. Quarantine re-makes the city around u…