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…
Just published, and not behind a paywall. You can find it here, in the Spring 2020 issue of Anthropological Quarterly. Update – now it is! Uggh – what…
From Wikimedia Commons As I complete this essay, the quarantine imposed on Baltimore stretches into its second month, and I continue teaching online amid terror and despair.&nbs…
(from our storymap) In my capacity as a fellow in our faculty research center, I’ve been doing a lot of support work for the unexpected shift to learning-at-a-distance. …
From the conclusion to my contribution on “Social Media” in Wiley’s “The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology:” Anthropologists are still coming to terms with social media and its impact…
My review of the tremendously exciting collection of translated South Korean science fiction: Readymade Bodhisattva. It’s the first of its kind in English, and serves as a tremendous…
The American Anthropological Association/ Canadian Anthropological Society meeting in Vancouver is in November, but the browsable schedule is already out. As in previous years, I have identified…
(A day’s worth of geolocated instagram posts in Baltimore: August 24, 2018) The digital world presupposes a binary logic of connection and disconnection, one that decomposes into haves…
Wired magazine – mostly hagiographies of silicon valley entrepreneurs – capitalist porn – vague reassurances for the future from the uber-wealthy. 500 dollar headphones. The Senior Associa…
Please check out this provocative collection of papers at cultural anthropology. Edited by Ryan Anderson, Emma Louise Backe, Taylor Nelms, Elizabeth Reddy and Jeremy Trombley (and including my…
As I have done over the past few years (2017, 2016), I returned from AAA2018 and ran some Twitter analytics. Here’s the sociograph I came up with (click…
“The future” (however imagined) continues to be a concern for anthropologists, and this year is no different than 2017. But while I was content to just list the…
https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/c28f0b6fab85650562ac54dd5cfa403e/my-seoul-fieldwork/index.htmlOver the course of a year of fieldwork in Seoul (2014-2015), I accumulated tons of photographs (a…
(I participated in a workshop organized by two anthropologists studying SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence): Claire Webb and Michael Oman-Reagan. The topic called for us to think…
The joint SCA/SVA “Displacements” conference has come to an end (although the archived presentations will remain up until the end of the month). By all accounts, this virtual…
Apophenia—the recognition of patterns within randomness—is, as Hito Steyerl (2016) has argued, a condition of the rapid multiplication of chaotic plumes of data swirling around us, data riven…