The Pandemic Shift: The School for Advanced Research Annual Report
Historian C. J. Alvarez came to SAR to work on a project exploring the US-Mexico border as a bioregion and to challenge, through his writin…
Witnessing Disappearance in China during the Global Pandemic
The landscape of Islam within China has been changing rapidly during the pandemic. Ethnographic fieldwork can map these erasures and disappearances in everyday life. It was an unusually…
Stop Erasing Transgender Stories From History
A Peruvian actress impersonates the ancient Moche Lady of Cao, whose biologically female body was buried alongside artifacts typically attributed to elite male warriors. Reuters/Alamy Stock P…
Wonder Woman – Leader, Superhero, Anthropologist
Wonder Woman – Justice League “You can be anything you want to be” Diana Prince AKA Wonder Woman , Justice League (Zach Snyder Cut, 2021) Today marks the…
Von der Kostbarkeit des heiligen Bodens
Es muss die Versiegelung gestoppt werden, es muss mehr renaturisiert werden und es muss der Boden dem Markt entzogen werden, weil er ist viel zu kostbar als dass…
Wednesday Round Up #43
How Whiteness Works: JAMA and the Refusals of White Supremacy What makes this story worth telling is not the drama of an editorial shakeup at one of the…
Victoria Shmidt and Bernadette N. Jaworsky, “Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice” (Routledge 2021).
In Central Europe, limited success in revisiting the role of science in the segregation of Roma reverberates with the yet-unmet call for contextualizing the impact of ideas on…
Oldest Beer Site
Check out this report in The Guardian on what may be the oldest site for producing beer in the world. Of course it was discovered by archaeologists…
Ungeliebte Denkmäler. Über Kriegsdenkmäler der Konföderierten und Denkmäler für die Vertriebenen
Viele Denkmäler passen nicht mehr in unsere politische Landschaft – in den USA ebenso wie in Deutschland. Sie feiern die falschen Helden oder erzählen von erlittenem Unrecht, um…
Unloved Monuments. On Confederate War Memorials and Monuments to the Expellees
Many monuments no longer fit into our political landscape – in the US as well as in Germany. They celebrate the wrong heroes or tell of injustices suffered…
Motivation and Apathy in the Time of COVID-19
For many graduate students, the pandemic has postponed fieldwork and changed research plans. How do we keep going and cope with these challenges to our academic careers? …
Sustaining Bilingual Education Amid School Choice Expansion
Students, parents, and educators in Milwaukee continue a tradition of bilingual education activism and resist choice schools’ scaling up of linguistic subtraction. At La Escuela Bilingüe Foster’s (Fo…
Reviews: Theorising Media & Conflict
This post compiles extracts of published reviews of the edited volume Theorising Media & Conflict (eds. P. Budka & B. Bräuchler, Berghahn Books, 2020). Younes Saramifar (Free University…
Why a Mexican Village’s DIY Cellphone Network Matters
A campesino checks his cellphone while working in the fields outside of Talea de Castro, Mexico (the mountain village in the distance on the upper left). Agustine Sacha…
Leivestad, Hege Høyer, Johanna Markkula and Elisabeth Schober: Beyond Suez. Escalating Ship Sizes and their Consequences
Stuck At the height of this pandemic’s third wave, with many of us sitting in what by now feels like an eternal lockdown, images of a gigantic ship…
El sujeto es lo que nos sujeta
La foto es de Yanidel Fragmento de De la estructura al acontecimiento. El dentro y el afuera en la sociedad contemporánea, texto en el catálogo de la exposición…
Roy Richard Grinker, “Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness” (Norton, 2021)
A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral jud……
Banu Gökarıksel, et al., “Feminist Geography Unbound: Discount, Bodies, and Prefigured Futures” (West Virginia UP, 2021)
Feminist Geography Unbound: Discomfort, Bodies, and Prefigured Futures, edited by Banu Gökarıksel, Michael Hawkins, Christopher Neubert, and Sara Smith (West Virginia University Press, 2021)… Visit New Books in Anthropology for…
Screenshots of the Field: Viral Loads and the Contagious Potentials of Digital Ethnography
Over the course of the past six months, I have been actively doing fieldwork on HIV care in Turkey on Zoom. Believe it or not, for an anxious…
Curative Cuisines of Cambodia
Editor’s Note: We recently published the winners of our first annual SAFN photo contest. There are, of course, interesting stories and research projects tied to the photos, which…
When ‘a People’s War’ Turns Against Them: Reflections on Uganda’s ‘War of the Wananchi’ against COVID-19 by Adventino Banjwa
Introduction “This is a people’s war”, declared President Museveni after the country’s first COVID-19 case, adding, “I have come here to lead the war of the wananchi [against…
Fairygodboss interview
Who better to lead User Experience than an anthropologist? Meet Natalie Hanson. She’s a Principal at ZS, where she provides human-centered strategy, research and design for clients. In…
Fairygodboss interview
Who better to lead User Experience than an anthropologist? Meet Natalie Hanson. She’s a Principal at ZS, where she provides human-centered strategy, research and design for clients. In…
Jonathan D. Hill reflects on his career
What moment of fieldwork interaction do you still think about, amazed that you got to witness it and/or record it? While doing fieldwork in 1981 for my doctoral…