A Vocabulary for Junk in Four Movements
Deponie. /depoˈniː/ noun. (German for ‘landfill, dumpsite’) To put down, to place, to hand over, to trash; or, to otherwise find some new purpose for. Freude. /ˈfʁɔʏ̯də/ noun.…
Tag: Data
Techno-geographies of digital phenotyping in mental health research by Jessy Williams
Can your phone keep you mentally well? Developments in digital phenotyping have brought new attention to forms of behavioural data collection that capitalise on the apparent ubiquity of…
Does Green on COVID-19 Maps Mean What You Think?
Picture a traffic light. This isn’t a trick question. We want you to visualize some sort of box housing three lightbulbs, each behind a colored filter: red on…
Mapping Algorithmic Assumptions: Reflections from a Society for Psychological Anthropology roundtable by Alexa Hagerty
Fritz Kahn, Der Mensch als Industriepalast, 1926. Detail. Image in public domain Introduction: surveil, classify and predict by Alexa Hagerty and Livia Garofalo The works distilled by the…
Making the Invisible Seen: The Infrastructure of Modern Groundwater Governmentality in Taiwan
In 2009, the Taiwan High Speed Railway Company (THSR) claimed that severe land subsidence in Changhua and Yunlin counties was compromising and damaging the structural integrity of the…
Data Activism and Petro-Public Knowledge “Across Borders”: The Formosa Plastics Global Archive
When our research group entered the Formosa Plastics museum in Taiwan, the first thing we noticed was a massive piece of kauri wood, sitting protected under a dome…
Girls, Gadgets, and Gatekeepers: What is Ethical Feminist Fieldwork When Working with Children?
There is no Institutional Review Board (IRB) or equivalent body in India. The ethics of research are left to the purview of researchers, their supervisors, and departments. Therefore,…
How Plants Become Bits: The Politics of Harmful Algal Bloom Mitigation in Lake Erie
The Power of One While seated at my kitchen table in my apartment in Columbus, OH, the site of my dissertation fieldwork, I attended an Ohio Agribusiness conference…
Form, Content, Data, Bodies: Jonathan Zong and Beth Semel on Biometric Sans by Jonathan Zong
The dominant discourse surrounding digital psy technologies such as MindStrong, a teletherapy app designed to detect mental health changes by monitoring changes in typing speed “down to the…
The subjects of digital psychiatry by Dörte Bemme
Giorgia Lupi/Stefanie Posavec (2014), MOMA “Dear Data, Week 8, A Week of Phone Addiction” All authors contributed equally to this essay Imagine a room full of research assistants…
Entrepreneurship and E-Health: How Promises of Innovation are Transforming India’s Primary Care Sector by Sandra Bärnreuther
Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes. “Health for…
What Type of Governmentality is This? Or, how do we govern unknowns by Robert D. Smith
In Le Temps, a French newspaper, anthropologist Julie Billaud wrote that the governance of COVID-19 represents “a move towards a biopolitical mode of governance that aims to manage…
The Public-Private Welfare State: constructing a data-driven health coverage in India by Marine Al Dahdah
Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes. “Health for…
A Politics of numbers? Digital registration in Kenya’s experiments with universal health coverage by Ruth J. Prince
Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes. “Health for…
The hype and hope of data for healthcare in Africa by Tom Neumark
Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes. …
Period Tracking Apps: Something Old, Something New
They’re sleek and colorful, “fun and easy”, full of icons and dials. Period tracking apps, or “menstruapps,” are an increasingly common way a large segment of the populat…
Det manglende engasjementet for den ‘smarte byen’, og hvorfor det bør bekymre deg
Innsamling av store datamengder blir stadig enklere, og mulighetene som åpnes opp av dette begynner å gjøre seg gjeldende i byutvikling. I såkalte ‘smarte byer’ ønsker man å…
Ep. #44: Digitising Migrants: Annalisa Pelizza on the European immigration crisis in an age of Big Data
“Migration issues in Europe are a hot topic right now – it’s not news that they have been used in the last 50 years as a way to…
I did it for the data
As an ethnographer of porn, I entered the field with some hard limits and never crossed them. I never ended up doing anything I regretted, but the pressure…
Clinical Data in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs: Ethnographic Engagements
A screenshot of the Patient Care Assessment System dashboard, as it appears to clinicians using it in the electronic health record (Fihn and Box 2016). By: Peter Taber,…
The Surveillance Cyborg
Editor’s Note: This post is part of our ongoing series, “Queering Surveillance,” and was co-written with Alexander Wolff. Surveillance is an embodied experience, both being watched a…
Towards a Queer Art of Surveillance in South Korea
Editor’s Note: This post was co-written with Timothy Gitzen. When is a face not a face? With the launch of the iPhone X that boasts facial recognition capabilities,…
EPIC Evidence: with Dawn Nafus and Tye Rattenbury – This Anthro Life
Exploring Evidence This Anthro Life is opening the conversation with EPIC (the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community) on the theme of Evidence. Taking center stage at this year’s…
Book Review: Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World by Crystal Biruk
In Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World, Crystal Biruk offers an analysis of the production of data within HIV-AIDS quantitative survey research conducted in Malawi. This…