At the Crossroads: EPIC, anthrodesign and the Return of Anthropology
EPIC is pausing its conference for 2027 just as the Wall Street Journal tells readers to study anthropology. Notes on the closing remarks at EPIC2026, the origins of…
EPIC is pausing its conference for 2027 just as the Wall Street Journal tells readers to study anthropology. Notes on the closing remarks at EPIC2026, the origins of…
Notes from Ted Tremper’s closing keynote at EPIC2026: how the Creators Coalition on AI built a shared vocabulary and a role-by-role map of AI’s impact on creative work.
Written by Michael Hudson The pioneering research by one of the founders of economic anthropology is essential for understanding the …
Notes from Ovetta Sampson’s Mindful AI breakout at EPIC2026: AI models come with values built in, and researchers and designers can work upstream to shape them.
Notes from the Deploying Context plenary at EPIC2026: David Ayman Shamma and Brent Hecht on reframing the problem, the cap on cutting labor costs, and why AI is…
Notes from the Building and Evaluating Synthetic People session at EPIC2026: an AI moderator, synthetic focus groups and conversational personas, and why synthetic people are only as useful…
November 1 2026 Rahardhika Utama Mornings in the Rubber Hills Life in the household where I lived for most of my fieldwork began in the dark, when Pak…
Notes from the Making Research Legible to Machines session at EPIC2026: from mushroom foraging to satellite imagery, why AI needs human and organizational context, and why researchers should…
Andrew Mitchel and Amanda Kaminsky We are less than a month away from the AAA conference. Amanda Kaminsky and I prepared this list of all the SAFN panels…
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I’ve been thinking through a lot since the Cornell news broke. The heinous nature of the crime, the existence of millions of lesser-known atrocities that lie under the…
Notes from the Modeling Context plenary at EPIC2026: what a map of young people’s statements, privacy-aware sensing and the market for expert AI training data show about the…
Notes from Patrícia Alves-Oliveira’s EPIC2026 keynote: what an assistive feeding robot, a creativity robot built with children, and a co-researcher with lived experience show about the role of…
Notes from the EPIC2026 Prototypes & MVPs session: a belt that senses magnetic north, the silences AI skips, and why judgment about where AI belongs in research is…
Since the last post we’ve conducted two fieldwork trips to Lobeke National Park. Fair to say it’s pretty out of the way – three days by 4X4 on…
My colleague Sumin Myung and I are launching a Critical Data Studies Lab at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington on Friday 13 November 2026.
Sitting in a parked car, phone propped up on the dashboard, recording, he takes a bite of his Chipotle bowl between sentences about a metabolic drug meant to…
Written by Colin Greer; Eric Laursen Toxic societal polarization is the product of malignant bonding, scarcity mindsets, and trauma. However, …
Hasn’t the sheer abundance of chit-chat made criticism, and even journalism you pay for, obsolete? Articles that would bug most people aren’t even read because something else more…
Poster del evento El pasado jueves 17 de septiembre de 2026 tuvimos una conversación con la Dra. Barbara Miller, profesora de antropología y relaciones públicas en la…
Playing this game in class was the highlight of my 2025 teaching year.
November 9th, 2016 found me as shocked and depressed as any Hilary Clinton supporter — and not only because the xenophobic, racist, sexist, and generally despicable Donald Trump…
14 September 2026 Samprati Pani A long-time resident of a neighbourhood might suggest one to you. And when you set out looking for it, a chaiwala or a…