Neolithic Plumbing: The Landscape is a Machine
Water is, among its many attributes, fluid. Left to its own devices it runs, spills, flows, leaks, crashes, and splashes. Holding H2O still is nearly impossible above 0°C.…
Tag: General
Before They Erase It: Memory and the social media archive
Disponible en español aquí. This afternoon, I began to notice increasingly alarming images, posts, and tweets from my interlocutors in Santiago. It appeared that Santiago was on fire,…
Period Tracking Apps: Something Old, Something New
They’re sleek and colorful, “fun and easy”, full of icons and dials. Period tracking apps, or “menstruapps,” are an increasingly common way a large segment of the populat…
Optics and Fluidity: Evading Surveillance in Hong Kong
請點此閱讀中文版 Eyes in/on/for Hong Kong At the Hong Kong airport, thousands of protesters line the arrivals hall. Creating a corridor for passengers to walk through, they stand silently,…
Content Moderation: Mediating Public Speech Privately
Social media constitutes a universe of more images, text and videos than can be humanly experienced, read, and heard. However, disinformation, terrorist content, harassment, and other kinds of…
Happy Hispanic
Today, in celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15-October 15), we bring you a compilation of some of our favorite past posts from the Spanish-speaking world. Happy…
Battery Life: Charging Culture at the End of Energy
Vodka-tonic. Take my picture. Charge my phone. Vodka-tonic. Take my picture. Charge my phone. This (or a similar sequence) is an irritatingly common refrain heard by many waitstaff…
Nature-Based Integration: Building Taskscapes Together in Swedish Nature
We’re a diverse group: between us we hail from four continents and our languages include Somali, English, Spanish and Swahili. We’re one of several subgroups that have been…
[Author Interview] Tom Gieryn and “Truth Spots”
Ilana Gershon interviews Tom Gieryn about his new book, Truth Spots: How Places Make People Believe (University of Chicago, 2018). Gieryn is Rudy Professor Emeritus of Sociology at…
The Surveillance Cyborg
Editor’s Note: This post is part of our ongoing series, “Queering Surveillance,” and was co-written with Alexander Wolff. Surveillance is an embodied experience, both being watched a…
Dumbwaiters and Smartphones: The Responsibility of Intelligence
“I don’t have to drink alone,” she paused for comedic effect, “now that I have Alexa.” Thus was the punchline of a story told by a widowed octogenarian…
Out-of-Body Workspaces: Andy Serkis and Motion Capture Technologies
Upper image, production shot of live action actor James Franco (Left) and Andy Serkis, with digital character superimposed (Right). Lower image, the finished shot of live action and…
Critiquing Big Data in China and Beyond
“I do think that the Internet truly makes us feel the world can become a smaller place,” an interlocutor, whom I will call Bo, told me in his…
Voided Spaces: Architectural indices of ravines in Guatemala City
Photo by Jorge Villatoro: Ravine in Zone 3, Guatemala City Deep, canyon-like ravines fracture forty-two percent of Guatemala City. Covered in thick, wet, and dense foliage, these ravines…
Forecasting Earth Futures
This is the second in a series of posts by scholars who attended the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, an event hosted in September by Deakin University as part of…
Of Camels, Platypuses, and the Future of the Blog
It has been said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. We might think of the platypus in much the same way, though the key…
Beyond the Horizon available online
“Beyond the Horizon: Essays on Myth, History, Travel and Society”, originally published in 2008, is now available online at https://oa.finlit.fi/site/books/10.21435/sfa.2/ The book was edi…
The Sounds of STS: In conversation with Prof. Stefan Helmreich
I was first introduced to the work Stefan Helmreich, an anthropologist of science at MIT, as a first year PhD student. As an STS student, I’ve always been…
Interview with Angie Heo
https://matskut.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/1117/Interview%20with%20Angie%20Heo.mp3 In the beginning of March 2018, Angie Heo gave a talk in our visiting se…
Melissa Demian: The gender of the minibus
https://matskut.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/1104/Melissa%20Demian.MP3 If the lecture does not stream properly or you want to listen to it offline, download the audio file here. Melissa Demi…
Joel Robbins: Anthropology between Europe and the Pacific
https://matskut.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/1099/Joel%20Robbins%20only%20talk.mp3 If the lecture does not stream properly or you want to listen to it offline, download the audio file here. …
Angie Heo: The Political Lives of Saints. Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt
On March 2, 2018 Angie Heo delivered a talk in our visiting seminar titled “The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt”. We later conducted a brief…
Susanne Brandtstädter: Rising Above the Ordinary: Justice, Virtue, and Normative Change in the Chinese Countryside
https://matskut.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/1105/susanne%20Brandtsta%cc%88dter.mp3 If the lecture does not stream properly or you want to listen to it offline, download the audio fil…
Matti Eräsaari: Value, measure and standard: time in the Helsinki Timebank
https://matskut.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/1090/matti%20erasaari.MP3 If the lecture does not stream properly or you want to listen to it offline, download the audio file here. Matti Eräsaa…