Scattered Thoughts in a Crisis
The world has taken notice that the United States of America is in crisis. In solidarity with the plight of Black Americans, protests have cropped up in many…
Tag: Blog
Don Kalb: Covid, Crisis, and the Coming Contestations
Don Kalb, University of Bergen At some point in late January I told my family over WhatsApp with the Marxist bluster they usually enjoy from me that if…
Balancing Acts: An Ethnographer’s Thoughts on Studying Religion
Anthropologists sometimes study sensitive topics and it is therefore not uncommon for ethnographic work to attract serious criticism along such lines. In a recent social media thread, I…
Gavin Smith: Rereading Marx on machines in the time of COVID-19
Gavin Smith, University of Toronto “One of the many perils lies in normalizing the ‘batshit crazy’ presently underway.”—Wallace, Liebman, Chavez & Wallace 2020: 5 The COVID-19 pandemic has…
Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber: “A Matter of Priority”: The Covid-19 Crisis in Indonesia
Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber, University of Cambridge COVID-19 is wreaking havoc in Indonesia. The government ignored the crisis for too long, relying on a dubious religious discourse of divine pro…
How COVID-19 makes us use our bodies differently
COVID-19 has prompted a renewed awareness of how we use our bodies under “normal” circumstances. COVID-19 is also demanding that we change our bodily behaviors to prevent the…
Google develops AI that designs better chips for AI
Covid-19 -> Skynet 2021. Their new approach is to use AI itself to speed up the process of chip design. And the results are impressive. Their machine learning…
The Design Squiggle as a Way of Thinking about Anthropological Research
The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman, thedesignsquiggle.com It seems to be well known among designers, but I only recently learned about the “Design Squiggle” a few day…
Revisiting the Past: Some Thoughts on the UNCC Shooting
Today is April 27, 2020. April 30 will mark one year since a gunman walked into my LBST 2213 class on the last day of the semester. I’ve…
The home, the office and the home-office: What makes it ‘work’?
Yesterday, I started an email to my supervisor with the opener “I am wearing shoes today and it seems to make me more productive. How’s it going in…
Next-level Deepfake Avatars for Zoom
My attempts with Facerig have been fun, but I’ve learned of a tool that lets you use the technology behind deepfake videos to turn faces of famous people…
Sharryn Kasmir: Prospects for Left Politics in the United States amid Coronavirus and Capitalist Crisis
Sharryn Kasmir, Hofstra University & University of Bergen Several weeks into the global pandemic, the gravity of the COVID-19-triggered economic crisis in the United States is coming into…
Bear life, with apologies to Agamben
(via Stuff, a respected New Zealand news site, despite its name.) Teddy bears are popping up in windows around New Zealand homes as people come up with fun…
University is anything but universal: How to apply to graduate school in three different countries
(For the past year or two, I’ve been contemplating writing a “missing manual” for university that explains the tacit skills and knowledge for getting by in university that…
Ramesh Sunam: The Precariousness of Migrant Workers in Japan amidst COVID-19
Ramesh Sunam, Waseda University, Tokyo Suraj (name changed), arrived a year ago from Nepal to study at a Japanese language institute in Nagoya, Japan. He was working part-time…
Symbolic confusion and how to flirt with emoji 💋😕
A couple of years ago, I started flirting with people online. Pretty much everyone. In nearly every conversation. I didn’t mean to, and I didn’t start it. But…
Andrea Tollardo: No return to old normalities: Reflections on a time of passage in locked down Italy
At the end of February, the center of Italian capital encountered an unexpected problem. Not an unforeseeable one, but one that was not previously thought possible in the…
Sandro Mezzadra: Politics of struggles in the time of pandemic
A prolonged wait at the pharmacy, a long queue before entering a supermarket. Experiences like this, today increasingly common, can help us to see how the spreading of…
Now on Youtube
You can visit my YouTube channel: Anthropology 365. I am currently working on content that covers a field examination of the use of anthropogenic (human-made) spaces by reptiles…
Using a Virtual Avatar in Zoom
If we’re all going to be locked down and locked into Zoom, then we might as well have a little fun with it. Inspired by a posting in…
Soziologische Impulse während Corona — Editorial
von Leonard Mach Die Bib ist zu, das E-Mail-Postfach quillt förmlich mit neu ankommenden Emails über und ich sitze mit einem Kaffee vor meinem Computer — Home Office…
Taking it Seriously: Comparing COVID-19 to malaria
The situation in which we now find ourselves in the privileged postcolonial West is a new one in the postwar period, but one that is more known to…
Beyond the Irish Border: A plague on both my houses in the time of COVID-19
Differing approaches to COVID-19 divided by the rolling hills and windy roads (of which there are many) of one of Europe’s most porous borders, have precipitated a personal…
Will Reducing Sugar Intake Help You Lose Weight?
It is scientifically proven that large amounts of sugar consumption necessarily affects weight gain and can lead to a disease such as obesity. The main problem is that…