‘Dynamic Totalities’: Data Surveillance as a Paradigm
In the zeitgeist of academia, surveillance has clearly an ominous connotation. However, is surveillance not fundamentally a way of looking? More formally, a way of looking at totalities.…
Tag: General
Wednesday Round Up #1
I’m starting the Wednesday round up back up. I didn’t post yesterday because of #shutdownstem. For more information on that, see shutdownstem.com. In the wake of the most…
MacHack VI: Computer chess and the roots of AI
On January 21, 1967, a mild winter Saturday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a couple of computer researchers from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…
Flattening the Mental Health Curve: Answers Already in Hand
Covid has impacted mental health. So too has police violence. And we still operate from a model where we have to go someplace to access individual care. Many…
Maps, Figurative Symbols, and Songlines
When I think of symbols, I default to a rather literal sense of them. In my Introduction to Anthropology class, I put up the symbol for radiation, say…
A coincidence is a strange type of fact
A coincidence is a strange kind of fact At the top of Václavksé náměstí, the central artery of Prague, in a solemnly gray but geometrically dynamic Socialist Realist…
Honey, let we tell you! A speculative trans-species storytelling of the Maya Forest borderlands
Note: This is a piece of speculative fiction inspired by an Ursula K. Le Guin story. While, sadly, the ability to read complex bee texts is not “real,”…
The Paradox of Autonomy and Care for Mothers of Adults with Disabilities in Brazil
Since the early 2000s, Brazil has experienced a significant change concerning the rights of people with disabilities in the country. Based on the struggles of the Brazilian Disability…
Platypus Celebrates AAPI Heritage Month
In celebration and recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, take a look back at some of our favorite past posts from and about the region.…
Black Geographies: New Maroon Studies and the Politics of Place
Jamaican Maroons are the descendants of Africans who escaped enslavement on plantations in the early colonial period. Mentions of the Maroons in the colonial record begin around 1655,…
Getting Online / Becoming Misaligned in the American Midwest
Data Threshers “Data Threshers” is a simulation portrait that experiments with the representation of metabolic conflicts in multiple scales of time, space, and perspective. Formally, the video takes…
Responding to the pandemic of 21st century : Dynamics of power, intersections and the ‘Imagined Corona’ in India
The current times have seen a surge of concern around the soaring cases of the global pandemic of COVID 19. The novel nature of the virus has pitted…
The militarization of life under war, “post-conflict,” and the COVID-19 crisis
Overlapping experiences of confinement Like many others in Colombia, Nairys[1] is a campesina for whom the experience of confinement has been one of dramatic disruption. Marked by restricted…
Architecture as a Justice-Accessing Technology in Postwar Guatemala
Forest analysis of scorched earth. Courtesy of Daniele Profeta. Princeton University, 2015. On an early January morning in 2015 a group of lawyers from the Guatemalan NGO Mujeres…
#Hashtag: “I AM one of the 1.4 Billion”
When I agreed to write this post in January, I could not have imagined that I would be doing so in quarantine. The state of the coronavirus continues…
Doctor Andrew Graan discussing fake news and anthropology on PoLAR
[…] So, where does fake news figure into all of this? I would like to suggest that fake news—both as deliberately false news stories and as a political…
Eco-Horror: Facing Climate Change in Minas Gerais, Brazil
Storm clouds over Minas Gerais. Photo by Mariela Guimarães (Pedro Rocha Franco and Jefferson Delbem 2020). The January 2020 floods in Minas Gerais, Brazil were catastrophic for the…
Friday Seminar Series 13.3.: Antoinette Jackson, University of South Florida “Intangible Cultural Heritage and Living Communities – Curating ethnographic resources and engaging people”
Abstract: A cultural heritage perspective places priority on values and meanings that people ascribe to places, things, and ways of remembering. This talk focuses on tensions, challenges, and…
Technologies of Representation: Possibilities of Social Media in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul
Image posted by Selahaddin Abi on Facebook “Every week somebody comes here to take photos of our laundry and put it up on the internet. Today, I took…
The Memory of Fire: Burning Backwards into the Future
Fire breathes oxygen. Fire consumes organic material. Fire ages and dies. Fire runs, jumps, and simmers. Fire responds differentially to external irritants. Fire has moods. Among many of…
Friday Seminar Series 7.2 : Sasha Newell “The Crowding of Clutter: Possession, Heterochrony, and Congestion in U.S. Domestic Life”
The Crowding of Clutter: Possession, Heterochrony, and Congestion in U.S. Domestic Life Sasha Newell, Université Libre de Bruxelles February 7th 2020, 2-4 PM, Unioninkatu 35, Room 113/4 Building…
New publications on borders and topology by Sarah Green
”Lines, traces, and tidemarks: further reflections on forms of border” in 2018, The political materialities of borders: new theoretical directions. Demetriou, O. & Dimova, R. (eds.). 1 ed.…
New Publication by Anni Kajanus, together with Narges Afshordi and Felix Warneken, on how children’s understanding of hierarchical relations develops in China and the UK.
A. Kajanus, N. Afshordi*, & F. Warneken (2020), Children’s understanding of dominance and prestige in China and the UK, Evolution and Human Behavior, 41(19), 23-34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j…
Carna Brkovic: Bios, Zoe, Psyche? Forms of Life in a Refugee Camp in Montenegro
https://matskut.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/1240/ZOOM0056.MP3 Carna Brkovic from University of Goettingen gave a talk on Friday the 17th of January 2020 ti…