Between Pain and Relief: Morphine’s Ambiguities in India
The root of the word morphine is Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. Neil Gaiman’s contemporary reimagining of the character in his magnum opus Sandman likewise thrusts upon…
Tag: General
Madam Cistern
The following monologue was originally written in Portuguese for the ongoing theatrical project Dramaturgias da água e da seca (Water and Drought Dramaturgies), developed by Pavilhão da Magnólia,…
Fake, Real, Real, Fake: Salvarsan on the US Medical Market
A Swindle Exposed 1913, Chicago: A reporter, assuming the name Edward Donlin, enters a downtown medical establishment that has advertised widely in Midwestern newspapers offering Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s…
Drawing More-than-Human Kinship
Introduction In my work as an anthropological ethnographer and illustrator, I have been working to connect seemingly disparate disciplines together—at times, even as a messy and rough bricolage.…
Hippocrates Against Protocols: Experiments, Experience, and Evidence-Based Medicine in Brazil
Image of a statue of Hippocrates (460 BC – 377 BC), considered the “father” of Western medicine.Source: Pixabay, no coyrights Introduction In this text, I address processes in…
AI, Climate Adaptation, and Epistemic Injustice
Amid global climate impacts, vulnerable communities—including indigenous peoples, farmers, fisherfolk, and low-income groups—are frequently expected to adapt, change, and build resilience to uncerta…
Tokens, Voids, and Archives: Locating Berlin’s NFT Projects
I’m standing on the train platform of U Schloßstraße, an U-Bahn station in Berlin’s Steglitz neighborhood. In front of me is an artwork: a beauty advertisement depicting a…
A Vocabulary for Junk in Four Movements
Deponie. /depoˈniː/ noun. (German for ‘landfill, dumpsite’) To put down, to place, to hand over, to trash; or, to otherwise find some new purpose for. Freude. /ˈfʁɔʏ̯də/ noun.…
Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Entropy: Internet and Synthetic Biology Pioneer Randy Rettberg’s Story on How Information Was Forged
Our first encounter with Randy Rettberg was somewhat surreal. Not that the others weren’t—the sui generis atmosphere is always present—but that first meeting was set in a scenario…
Making Bioethnographic Teams Work: Disciplinary Destabilization, Generative Friction, and the Role of Mediators
Increasingly, scholars across the life and social sciences recognize the necessity of multi-method, interdisciplinary research for its ability to adequately understand the world’s complex problems.[1]…
Becoming a Socialite: How Virtual “Fakeness” Produces Material Realities among Urban Chinese Gay Men
Real, Unreal, and Whatever Else In-between On Chinese gay dating apps, “fake profiles” are a constant concern: photos might have been altered or biometrics might have been fabricated.…
How Microbes Became Friendly: Visualizations of the Microbiome in Public Media
The biology, as astonishing as it is, does not tell us what it will mean. -Stephan Helmreich, “Homo Microbis” (2014, 4) Within microbiome research, the human body can…
Memorializing Eruption
Perched on a makeshift stage, a trio dressed in wool ponchos sings pirekuas, the region’s most acclaimed and loved musical genre in a mix of Purépecha and Spanish.…
Setting Traps: For an Insurgent and Joyful Science
While visiting the exhibition by the artist Xadalu Tupã Jekupé at the Museum of Indigenous Cultures in São Paulo, one of the works caught my attention. It was…
“Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”: Food, Cooking, and Eating in Video games
Pixelated Paradise “Are you seriously telling me that this hot mash of mushrooms and fruit is going to completely heal his wounds?” (Gilbert 2019) It is summer 2020…
Violence/Freedom: Gender and the Politics of Surveillance in Public Parks
Cities all over the world have witnessed a surge in the use of surveillance technologies, such as data-gathering phone apps, facial recognition software, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras…
Birding in Ruins: Multispecies Encounters and the Ecologies of Evidence
As we walked by some of the former shrimp ponds in an abandoned aquaculture farm, we approached a scene I easily overlooked until Julian asked me to document…
The Perfect Fit
In my new book, The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2022) I study the work of repair and maintenance necessary…
The Use of Patent Information to Investigate Algorithmic Systems
During my master’s degree, I wanted to study the idea that some social media platforms had tools for guiding users’ behavior in a certain direction. Even though this…
Making Forecasts Work: The Evolution of Seasonal Forecasting by Funceme in Ceará, Northeast Brazil
Every January, government officials, urban dwellers, and rural families across the state of Ceará, Northeast Brazil anxiously await the rainy season forecasts from Funceme, the Research Institute for …
Digital Multiples and Social Media
In this post, we unpack the meaning and many works of creating and maintaining digital multiples, a term we coined in our recent ethnography, A Filtered Life, to…
Transpositioning, a Hypertext-ethnography
This is a work of hypertext-ethnography. It is based on my research of a small genetics laboratory in Tokyo, Japan where I am studying the impact of the…
Becoming the Game: Hardware Hacking, Agency, and Obsolescence
Introduction When I asked my aunt back in 2014 if my old Game Boy Color was still around, she handed it to me, but confirmed that the A…
Dining with the Diaspora: Khmerican Digital Gastrodiplomacy
During my first semester of undergrad, I began my truly independent cooking journey—a path many have taken before me, but few survive. After weeks of failing to replicate…