Race, Rural Livelihoods, and Contested Conservation Landscapes
A visit to Basu Farms in Pembroke Township, about 60 miles south of Chicago, provides a glimpse into the entanglement of land tenure, black history and self-determination in…
Tag: expertise
Is Uncertainty a Useful Concept? Tracking Environmental Damage in the Lao Hydropower Industry
The collapse last week of a major hydropower dam in southern Laos, the Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy, as a tropical storm dumped an unknown, but massive, volume of water into…
Three Lies of Digital Ethnography
anthro{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Gabriele de Seta, contributing the final post in the Private Messages from the Field series edited by Crystal Abidin and Gabriele de Seta. Three Lies of…
Virtual roundtable: “Collaborative dilemmas” in the age of uncertainty
“Collaborative dilemmas” was the title of a workshop held last April at EHESS in Paris under the framework of “UNESCO frictions: heritage-making across global governance” in collaboration with…
Whose Populism? Which Democracy?
“Populism” conflates widely disparate political projects under one conceptual category. The term demands closer anthropological analysis. “The new enemy.” In a recent column in El País, the Peruvian…
On Extroverted Expertise, One-Handed Scientists & Dirty Laundry #REDUX
In 2014, Vincent Ialenti wrote about deflated optimisms among European scientists grappling with political questions about their legitimacy, the capitalization of their expertise, and the frustrations…
Cultural #evidence and the law
How do we decide whether or not to accept the evidence of our senses, or to put our faith in the statements of others? These are questions we…
On parasitic professionalism
Last month I received an email from an “associate” working at a research institution that caters to the biggest development agencies worldwide: DFID, UN, Worldbank, Australian Aid –…
The risks of expertise in studying higher education
I just got home from a great panel on “Re-Creating Universities Through Critical Ethnography” at the Society for Cultural Anthropology Meetings. It was organized by Davydd Greenwood, who…
Embracing Impostor Syndrome
image source It seems a fair amount of academics, especially women, suffer from impostor syndrome, “a constant fear of being discovered to be a fraud and a charlatan.”…