Engineering obsolescence
Marisa Cohn Editor’s Note: Marisa Leavitt Cohn writes to us from Stockholm, where she is a postdoctoral scholar studying the politics of software systems and computing work practices. In…
Tag: Fieldwork
Ethnography as Diaspora
Lilly U. Nguyen Editor’s Note: Lilly U. Nguyen (@deuxlits) tells us how in her own work on the ethnography of software in Vietnam, she both studies and embodies “diaspora” –…
Measurements: The Qualitative Work of Quantitative Work
Katie Pine Max Liboiron Editor’s Note: Katie Pine and Max Liboiron continue this week’s theme of makers, hackers, and engineers with a post about the politics and performativity…
Falling in: how ethnography happened to me and what I’ve learned from it
Austin Toombs Editor’s Note: Austin Toombs (@altoombs) brings a background in computer science and a critical sensibility to his ethnographic research on maker cultures. He explores the formati…
Studying Up: The Ethnography of Technologists
Nick Seaver Editor’s Note: Nick Seaver (@npseaver) kicks off the March-April special edition of Ethnography Matters, which will feature a number of researchers at the Intel Science and Technolog…
March-April 2014: Studying Hackers, Makers, and Engineers
This month’s theme – ethnographies of hackers, makers, and engineers – is edited by Morgan G. Ames, who made the transition from being a hacker to studying them…
Tell Me More danah boyd: an interview with the author of “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens”
danah boyd (@zephoria) is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Research Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and a Fellow at Harvard’s…
“Hey, y’all got to understand – y’all prolly scared of us… we scared of y’all too!”
Phoenix Jackson is a researcher at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, a Cornelius Hopper Diversity Fellow with UCSF, and a Somatic Counseling Psychotherapy graduate student at…
A shift in the business environment that ethnographers can’t ignore
Ken Anderson (@kxande2) manages the Cultural Transformations Lab at Intel. He is an iconoclast by nature and a symbolic anthropologist by training. Over the last 20 years, his…
Anthropology and the State during Globalization
What’s happening with the anthropology of the state? It seemed that in the 1990s, anthropology was breaking from the ethnographic trilogy of one fieldworker, one village, one year,…
Anthro field gear review: Cocoons OveRx photochromic eyewear
A few months ago, I embarked on a series of posts reviewing online retailers of high index (read: strong) prescription eyeglasses. The result was an unexpectedly detailed 5-part…
Life on water: a photographic tale from Cambodia
Back in August 2012 I spent a day at the Vietnamese floating village at Kampong Chnnang, central Cambodia. Lying at the mouth of the Tonle Sap Lake, much…