DEI Website Launched!
Our new website is now online. In the blog, we will be presenting and discussing various research activities, projects and events in relation to “the digital” at the…
Tag: General
Wednesday Round Up #3
Wednesday Round Up #3 “Decolonize Maiz” is art work by Ernesto Yerena. You can purchase it from the Saguaro Gallery. Black Lives Matter: How the movement that’s changing…
Some Chloroquine-AZT Parallels and Science’s Credibility Struggles
As an anthropologist and STS researcher, a great deal of my academic career has been proudly dedicated to studying and denouncing the bias, inequalities, and prejudice within both…
Managing Refugee Mobilities: Global Flows of Migration Deterrence Technologies
In 2000, a United Nations Resolution designated June 20th World Refugee Day. In the week leading up to this day, countries throughout the world pay homage to the…
Wednesday Roundup #2
Tyrone B. Hayes on how racism works in the academy. Hayes also was featured in the New Yorker for his groundbreaking work on how manufactured chemicals negatively impact…
‘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.…
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…