REDUX: #PrecAnthro. Let’s talk about unionisation. #hautalk
First published on the 21st of June 2018 The HAU controversy is both a disappointment and an opportunity. It is a disappointment because it reflects the troubled condition…
First published on the 21st of June 2018 The HAU controversy is both a disappointment and an opportunity. It is a disappointment because it reflects the troubled condition…
For people immersed in bureaucratic institutions, like universities, the current ruckus over HAU raises at least one longstanding anthropological question: what kind of organizational structure not on…
As an established blog with personal and institutional contacts to many of those involved in the recent upheaval at HAU and the Society of Ethnographic Theory, we do…
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…
As students and academics in Poland are fighting to defend democracy and autonomy of the universities, this post is a battle cry. It outlines the threats to intellectual…
The 27th of May to the 3rd of June is National Reconciliation Week in Australia. Reconciliation, for anthropology, includes reckoning with the discipline’s colonial past, and confronting the…
We need to acknowledge the role we all play in silencing research. Consider the times we have dismissed a colleague’s idea because it ‘isn’t worth it’, or immediately…
By: Gina Athena Ulysse Before reading Zoe Todd’s “Should I stay or Should I go?,” I had been pondering writing a post about why and how, I, a…
Ninety percent of the time if you were to read a blog post about academics and politics it would be a rant about “identity politics.” This isn’t going…
The “publish or perish” imperative in academia is periodically debated in the newspapers. I think some distance should be taken from the arguments developed in such articles. Even…
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…
By Anar Parikh [The following essay emerges from conversation with fellow PhD student and AES/SVA attendee, Scott Ross (George Washington University).] How is it that a senior anthropologist…
Anthropologist Charlie Piot has been conducting research on the political economy and history of rural West Africa for over thirty years. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity…
“Any concept — capitalism, neoliberalism, etc. — leaves an excess that it is the aim of anthropology to unearth. These are spaces that are not dominated by whatever’s…
Yesterday, Cultural Anthropology updated its recent forum on academic precarity with several additional essays, including one that I wrote about the role that academic hierarchy plays in shaping…
This month, Ian (1:25) digs into Bitcoin, arguing that the cryptocurrency is no different than regular currencies, and can be analyzed along all the same lines: symbolically, materially,…
It’s Anthropology Day, our discipline’s latest invented tradition! A time for reflection on chocolate mint and the values of our discipline, Anthropology Day 2018 is uniquely placed this y…
I am delighted to welcome writer Cileme Venkateswar to anthropod. This is the third post in my series on doing fieldwork with kids, and in it Cileme (who…
If you are an academic who is in a secure, full-time position then , let’s be honest, no one in the precariate wants to listen to you complain…
Since the 1980s, audits have almost become mundane. They have provided means by which employers can increase efficiency and productivity, as well by which the most disenfranchised can…
“Doing history ideally is like doing anthropology of people who are gone, except that you don’t have native informants, you only have these written fragmentary sources. But the…
In The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology, John Smyth offers a critical reading of the pathological state of higher education today, diagnosing this as th…
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…