Living in a Time When “Death Feels Closer”
“I know I’m young, and dying isn’t something I’m ‘supposed’ to think about yet, but how can I not? Death feels like it is everywhere,” earnestly intoned Autumn,…
Tag: General
2021 at Platypus
Pixabay The first weeks of 2021 brought no relief, even though so many hoped otherwise. Instead, the first twelve days clearly demonstrated that exclusion, inequity, violence, and multiply…
Connection, Inc.: Fast Times for Online Dating in the Age of Quarantine
Online Dating Goes Back to the Future Have you noticed an uptick in move-ins or engagements in your social circles lately? How about divorces? While everyone seemingly dreads…
Mobilizing Cemeteries, Representing Ancestors: The Infrastructure of Protest and the Anti-Petroleum Complex Movement in Pengerang, Malaysia
Resisting the “Rotterdam Port of the East” In 2011, the prime minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, and the CEO of the national oil company Petronas, Shamsul Azhar Abbas,…
The Silence before the Silent Spring: Narratives of Modernity and the Silences around the Toxicity of Pesticide Use
Pesticide-use and the control of pest populations with synthetic chemicals are a subset of the history of the “modernization” of agricultural practices. This narrative positions pesticides as an…
International Day of Persons with Disabilities: What Happens the Day After?
Twenty-eight years ago, in 1992, the United Nations General Assembly resolution 47/3 proclaimed December 3 as International Day of Persons with Disabilities. Immediately following the International Da…
When You Can’t Look Away: Seeing and Difference in American Medicine
Juliet When I interviewed her, Juliet was a third-year medical student and a dedicated member of her medical school’s interest groups on social justice. I interviewed her because…
The ICT Poverty Trap: How Technology Disparities Exacerbate the Spread of Disease and Division in Jamaica
A view of the street side in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital. A leaning telecommunications tower, symbolic of the island’s deficient ICT infrastructure, separates the stalls of informal street vendors…
The Work it Takes to Stop Working: Productivity in Labs and Sugarcane
In spring of 2020, thousands of scientific labs across several continents shut down. What was deemed “non-essential” research was ramped down and/or paused in an effort to stop…
A Technology of Empowerment and Governance: The IUD/IUS and Sexual Health Care in Toronto, Canada
The intrauterine device (IUD) and the intrauterine system (IUS) have a long and complicated history. The IUD is a contraceptive device inserted into the uterus, which serves as…
“Doing Being a Latina,” or Performing Identities Through a Computer Voice
The ability to communicate is often taken-for-granted and imperceptible, despite being vital to everyday life. It defines our social performances as family members, professionals, and neighbors. Moreo…
Connectedness in a Time of Pandemic
Right now, many of us are reevaluating what it means to be connected. In the United States, we often think of connectivity as having wireless broadband service, or…
Manipulating student evaluations: the Downey Sales School method
Student evaluations are biased? Yes, yes, they are. Research has repeatedly shown that students’ evaluations of teaching quality show a range of biases. For example, Anne Boring, Kellie Ottoboni…
Crackles of Science and other Signs of the Unseen in East Africa
After hearing that several villagers stored bags full of radioactive sand inside their family houses, the nuclear scientist explained that he went into a man’s home with a…
Wednesday Round Up #18
This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic There are COVID-19 incidents in which a single person likely infected 80 percent or more of the people in…
“Un-fixing” hormones: searching for the multiple in hormonal selves
What are hormones? While biomedical notions of hormones focus on their biological functions in bodies, hormones are also cultural artifacts, shaping understandings of health, normalcy, and what it…
On The Social Life of TBI
A Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a common injury that occurs when a physical blow or force to the head damages the brain inside the skull—full stop. As…
Pain-Free Mouse, being ‘human,’ and more-than-human ethics
The Voigt-Kampff test as seen in Blade Runner (1982). All copyrights to film held by Warner Bros. In the opening scene of Blade Runner, a fictional diagnostic called…
Friday seminar 25.9.: Loretta Ieng Tak Lou’s talk on freeganism and freecycling in Hong Kong
The Friday anthropology seminars are finally coming back on September 25th. We are beginning with Loretta Lou’s talk on freeganism and freecycling in Hong Kong (see below). The…
Getting around by sound: Human echolocation (first published, 14 June 2011)
(We are republishing ‘legacy content’ from our PLOS Neuroanthropology weblog, which has been taken down, along with many of the other founding PLOS Blogs. Some of these, I…
Consumer Genetics and the Capitalization of Hope
In the twilight of the last millennium, an audacious scientific project was started by an international team of researchers. Their objective, like the countless scientists who came before…
Environments that Could’ve Been
Speculation is inevitable in social science. Infinite variables exceed what a researcher can grasp, making confidence hard to attain. There are always gaps in our knowledge of reality,…
David Graeber: 1961-2020
Anthropologist, activist, and author David Graeber, author of some of the most popular and cutting recent works in our discipline, has passed away at 59 according to his…
The Vector, the Viruses, and the “Healthy World”: Placing Aedes aegypti in Brazil
Mosquito: the “most dangerous animal in the world,” human’s “deadliest predator.” This insect is often described as the most probable target for gene-editing technologies that have the potential…