Articulating Anthropology’s Value to Business
Businesses want and need anthropologists. It’s time we claimed our skills and told industry leaders what our training and expertise can do for them. Anthropological concepts, methods, and…
Tag: Featured Posts
Accessibility in the Switch to Online
As we experience the uncomfortable but necessary changes in response to COVID-19, many of us have continued our work by switching to virtual spaces, whether for meetings, classes,…
Dear White Anthropologists, Let Not Symbolism Overshadow Substance
Racism permeates the academy. We will need more than performative allyship and symbolic statements condemning racism in society if we are to build a more inclusive anthropology. …
Monuments to Hate
We do not sit outside of the world in which we live. The current fight over the fate of Confederate monuments in US life is a direct struggle…
Ten Film Scenes Every Stay-At-Home Cinephile Should Know
Ted Gideonse is a medical anthropologist who studies the effects of public health discourses about HIV and drugs. As people with more than a passing understanding of biology…
Imagining Rural Immunity
Political myth-making about America’s rural “heartland” is doubly pernicious, increasing rural vulnerability to COVID-19 and ignoring the disintegration of rural health services. In March 2020, Fair…
How to Start a Meditation Practice
I came to meditation because my brain is always running. The part of an academic’s job that requires me to think and theorize sometimes grows much larger than the…
Saving Anthropology from COVID-19
Higher education is at a crossroads. Can we adapt to the ongoing challenges and create transformative educational courses for an uncertain future? As colleges and universities started shutting…
Sign Languages as Disaster Entertainment
Sign language interpreters have become social media celebrities of our coronavirus moment. But signing is not a form of light entertainment; it should be lifesaving information. Dutch health…
The Funny Wrath of Italy’s Viral Mayors
In March 2020, a video of Italian mayors scolding citizens for failing to stay at home went viral. Only ostensibly insignificant, these clickable white men reveal new forms…
Coloring for Anthropologists
Get creative with our coloring page produced in collaboration with March Mammal Madness. Image description: A gorilla stands in mid-stride. Charon Henning March Mammal Madness is a bracket-based tourn…
Social Inequality in Times of Pandemics
We should not expect COVID-19 to behave in the same way as historical pandemics of plague. But both show how inequalities exacerbate mortality outcomes. It’s a gorgeous, warm…
On Living through Plagues and Wars in Lebanon
In much of the Global North COVID-19 is wreaking existential havoc. For the war-seasoned Lebanese in the throes of an economic meltdown and ongoing protests, it is yet…
Engaging the Pandemic
How one medical anthropologist is boosting our capacity to understand and contend with COVID-19. In late February 2020, I traveled back to the United States from India and…
Relationship-Making, Scaffolding, and a Pandemic in Istanbul
This piece was going to be mainly about relation-making as a method that facilitated my fieldwork, which in turn formed the backbone of my article, “Behind the Scaffolding.”…
A Game Changer for Graduate Schools and Anthropology
Recent articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Scientist both highlight the fact that graduate students are disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. Graduate students at…
CFP: VOTE
Image description: Blue and red hands reach toward a white ballot box. Each hand holds a small square of paper with an x marked on it. iStock To…
Anthropology of Wage Theft in Colorado
The theft of immigrant workers’ wages is a growing problem in the United States. In March 2018, University of Denver law student Katie Brown won $15,000 in County…
Accessibility at the AAA Meeting
Two anthropologists reflect on their experiences and ask what it will take to make our discipline and our Annual Meeting more accessible. Why should you care about accessibility?…
What’s in a Mask?
In early March 2020, groups of professional tailors and hobbyists formed to make high quality facsimiles of surgical masks to remedy a shortfall in personal protective equipment (PPE)…
Ten Things about Collaborating for Climate Solutions
Heather Lazrus is an environmental anthropologist who studies perceptions of and responses to extreme weather in the context of a changing climate. Image description: An illustrated portrait of…
The Social Lives of Climate Reports
IPCC reports are hailed as objective, empirical evidence. But the social life of their production and circulation has much to do with conflicting politics, values, and choices. In…
Unsustainable City
In New York, the sustainable city is being built on its own undoing. In 2014, residents of Staten Island’s Elm Park neighborhood found their cars covered in dust.…
Scientists Predict the Future for Antarctic Ice
The Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating rate. How do scientists explain and engage with this increasingly urgent climate crisis? Antarctic ice looms. Literally. Much…