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…
Tag: General
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…
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.…
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…