Our ‘Fashion Fast’: Week 5
We are nearly to the end of our 6-week ‘6 items challenge.’ As eight undergraduates and one lecturer at the University of Sussex, we have committed to living…
Tag: Ethics
Restoring the balance: Living well with pain by Else Vogel
Like dementia, persistent pain comes with irreparable losses: physical restrictions, strained relationships, financial problems, perished dreams and ambitions. Both conditions require ethnographers an…
Upsetting the Canon
Teaching anthropology offers a site for critical intervention. So what should we be reading with our students? A critical and reflexive anthropology requires, beyond the self-indulgent condemnation of…
Dumbwaiters and Smartphones: The Responsibility of Intelligence
“I don’t have to drink alone,” she paused for comedic effect, “now that I have Alexa.” Thus was the punchline of a story told by a widowed octogenarian…
The Story of our Fashion Fast!
by Rebecca Prentice, Hannah Amey, Maeve Devers, Rifka Fehr, Olive Howland Milne, Alfred Lewis, Phoebe Marsh, Joana Pereira and Amelia Yates As eight first-year anthropology students and one lecturer a…
Silicon Satire
How memes articulate tech trouble and signal “all the things.” History repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”—especially in Silicon Valley. In April 2018,…
‘More Anthropologists on Wall Street Please’ Revisited
by Silvia Irina Berástegui In October of 2011, The Economist published an article called “More Anthropologists on Wall Street Please” in which the author, one ‘M.S.’, responded to a…
Critiquing Big Data in China and Beyond
“I do think that the Internet truly makes us feel the world can become a smaller place,” an interlocutor, whom I will call Bo, told me in his…
Making an academic ‘coven’
Hierarchies persist, which is why factions, such as covens, coalesce in the first place. They emerge from a place of need. A need to counteract isolation, disparate power…
Will the Iconic Skull of an Ancient Human Return to Zambia?
[no-caption] Trustees of the NHM The town of Kabwe sits about 70 miles north of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, as the crow flies. Just over 200,000 people live in…
“We wunt be druv”- Intolerance of Tyranny at Lewes Bonfire
by Melissa Geere Lewes, a small town just ten minutes from the University of Sussex, makes headlines every November for its famous Bonfire celebrations. In 2018, the headlines were not…
Misinterpreting People
Anthropology has long ago dispensed with the notion that there is any ‘one’ truth. But I think most ethnographers still hope that in describing a group, the people…
5 Tips to Smash out Your PhD in Anthropology
I suspect thesis writing progression is a bit like sustainable weight loss. Calorie or step counting isn’t nearly as effective as getting in touch with how you feel…
MeToo Anthropology
I’ll spare you the worst of it but I will tell you that, some agonizing moments later, I was able to reach my field knife while he was…
North Sentinel Island and the Right to Be Left Alone
North Sentinel Island Vivaswa/Shutterstock This article originally appeared on The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. John Allen Chau knew he might die. The 26-year-old U.S…
A Relationship with Fashion: Thoughts from an Anthropology Student
by Silvia Irina Berástegui I arrived in Brighton 5 years ago with the dream of finding a good job and starting an autonomous life of my own. During…
Disrupting Silicon Valley’s Stories
In a climate of pervasive narratives of wealth creation and success, how can anthropology hold corporate and tech sectors to account? In March 2014, Business Insider published the…
Anthrocasts: some things I learned starting an anthropology podcast
If you can, cultivate relationships with some people who will give you honest feedback, always make it clear to your listeners that you welcome their point of view,…
A Reader’s Guide to the Anthropology of Ethics and Morality – Part III by Jeannette Pols
Editor’s note: We asked several scholars which readings they would recommend to students or colleagues interested in familiarizing themselves with the anthropology of ethics and morality. This is…
Are podcasts a wasteland? (with a post script about Kurt Wagner)
This image of Rebecca Walker is from the Wikipedia entry for Third Wave Feminism (I can’t find an attribution for the image on this page or the one…
The Skeletons in the Museum Closet
Museums are full of wonderful things. From the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian Institution’s natural history museum to the Folsom point at the Denver Museum of Nature &…
Ep. #25: Zombie nouns, meaningful objects, biopolitics in politics, and value trials: This month on TFS
This month Julia (0:59), starts us off with a discussion about zombie nouns – non-nouns that have been turned into nouns – such as sociality, relationality, neoliberalisation, and…
AAA Resources on Ethics and Professional Responsibility
[pquote] The MPAAC Ethics Representatives work closely with the AAA Ethics Advisory Group to field member queries about ethically difficult situations. [/pquote] We devote this month’s MPAAC column…
Ep. #24 Learning in disaster: Kim Fortun talks STS, knowledge politics & anthropology’s role in a crisis
“We need to be experimental because we’re not up to the task at hand; there’s a real practical and ethical call to responsibility, that drives that experimental commitment.”…