An Ethnography of Health Insurance Claims—How Blue Shield lawyers ignore subpoenas from consumers
For the last 6 years, I have been dealing with a health insurance claim for my wife’s hip operation in Thailand in January 2020. We were insured by…
For the last 6 years, I have been dealing with a health insurance claim for my wife’s hip operation in Thailand in January 2020. We were insured by…
I am going to share a story with you. And then I am going to explain what was, for me, the most important part of my PhD research:…
Introduction: Morality and power in humanitarian honors The arrival of hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Europe nearly a […] The post In the grey zone of…
Tulasi Srinivas‘s The Goddess in the Mirror is an ethnography of Bangalore’s beauty salons, teasing out how beauty intertwines with gender, labour, caste and myth in urban India.…
Budka, P., Schweitzer, P., & Povoroznyuk, O. (Eds.). (2026). Ethnographies of infrastructure [Special issue]. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 55(1). Cover of JCE, 55(1). Summary Ph…
Ching Kwan Lee’s Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle combines history, ethnography and sociological analysis. According to Lucas Tse, the author’s account of political tra…
“The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits…
Budka, P. (2025). Infrastructural disruption, entanglement and change in Northern Manitoba, Canada. Anthropologica, 67(1). https://doi.org/10.18357/anthropologica67120252709 My openly accessible a…
2026 AJJ Annual Conference May 23-24th, 2026 Akita University Conference Theme Entanglements and Embodiments: Anthropology, Ethnography and Sensing Japan Location The conference will be held …
Amatulli, G., & Budka, P. (Eds.). (2025). Narratives and temporalities of infrastructure: The Canadian experience [Special issue]. Anthropologica, 67(1). Cover of Anthropologica, 67(1). (Photo…
In the Andean cosmovision, constellations are not formed by connecting the dots of stars, but rather from the spaces of darkness in the night sky. The most important…
In this series we invite anthropologists to share stories of growth, change, and discovery throughout their careers. By reflecting on the life choices that shaped them, the unexpected…
Jon Kay with Jason Baird JacksonIndiana University Bloomington Jon Kay is Director of Traditional Arts Indiana and an Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington. In this…
A Mouse in a Cage by Carrie Friese explores the ethical challenges of using animals in scientific research. Through ethnographic case studies from UK labs, Friese probes the…
Matthew Archer’s Unsustainable critiques the frameworks used to measure corporate sustainability and exposes how market-driven reporting shirks environmental responsibility. This convincing and timely…
Recently I have been thinking about how I learnt to transition from fieldwork to writing. Like many graduate students, mid-way through my thesis research I found myself with…
By Pablo Ampuero-Ruiz – I remember very clearly the first lecture of my Master’s degree at Peking University in China. Professor Pan Wei was giving an introductory lecture…
I began my doctoral journey right before the pandemic set in. My project was going to critically examine the notion of “technology for social good” within the hyper-charged…
One early morning in August 2024, I boarded a coach bus in downtown San Francisco. We drove over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, past Reno, and through the Pyramid…
By Beth Bento – The day began with the high stakes of a long-awaited interview. After nearly a month in Altamira, Pará, I finally felt more connected to…
This text is a slightly adapted keynote/film introductory note I gave at a conference when the Department of Media and Social Sciences at the University of Stavanger celebrated…
On the morning of December 8, 2024, just hours after the fall of the Al-Asad regime was officially declared, Syrians […] The post The Dictator’s New Clothes: Syrian…