Poop by Joshua Grace
For colonial officials in British East Africa, African excrement endangered public health because Africans were reckless defecators. The world was their toilet, and they simply went where they…
Tag: infrastructure
Urban by Claudia Gastrow
In July 2015 a Facebook campaign entitled selfie lixo (garbage selfie) was launched in Angola. It asked people to pose in front of piles of uncollected garbage in…
Why The World Needs Anthropologists: Powering the Planet
By Simone Abram Why does the world need anthropologists? This is the question posed at an annual meeting of the Applied Anthropology Network of the European Association of…
Paper: Internet for remote First Nation communities in Northwestern Ontario
Budka, P. (2017). Internet for remote First Nation communities in Northwestern Ontario. Paper at “3rd CoRe Workshop – Mobility and Remoteness: What is the Connection?“, Vienna, Austr…
Antonio De Lauri: Times of walls: The politics of fencing in the contemporary world
In his well-known poem “Mending Wall” (1914), Robert Frost effectively depicted the act of walling: Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling…
Reclaiming Nature? Indigenous Homeland and Oil Sands Territory
Tara Joly, University of Aberdeen § Settler colonial relations construct the Athabasca region as extractive oil sands territory, yet the region remains homeland for Indigenous peoples, including Méti…
Relics of the Future
The sociotechnical functions of secondhand trams in Romanian cities. This post is the first in a three-part series on Romanian Mobilities: Vehicles of Migration in New Europe. The…
Web Roundup: Water by Lily Shapiro
Before I began graduate school, I worked in water-related public health, and have continued to follow the news around water. This month, some stories (mostly) about water. Trump…
Locating Care within the Nascent Infrastructure: Renal Dialysis in Thailand #MedTech
When new epidemics hit us, calls for infrastructural development are renewed. More investment in hospital facilities, medical staff and the development of effective protocols for disease control is…
Medical Technologies and Infrastructure: Exploring Im/Mobility and Dis/Connectivity in “Global Health” #MedTech
There are numerous approaches to defining “Global Health” (Brown, Cueto, and Fee 2006; Farmer et al. 2013; Fassin 2012; Janes and Corbett 2009), a phenomenon that Arthur Kleinman…
Material as opposed to what? Three recent ethnographies of welfare, biological labor, and human dignity by Leo Coleman
Catherine Fennell. Last Project Standing: Civics and Sympathy in Post-Welfare Chicago. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Kalinda Vora. Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of O…
Digital ethnography
Digital ethnography – a selection of resources e-Seminars of the EASA Media Anthropology Network: Facebook as research field and research platform: http://www.media-anthropology.net/file/esemin…
Are We All Flint? by Catherine Fennell
[This article originally appeared in Limn, Issue No. 7, “Public Infrastructures / Infrastructural Publics”.] For the past several decades, Flint, Michigan, has staggered under waves of de…
Are We All Flint? by Catherine Fennell
[This article originally appeared in Limn, Issue No. 7, “Public Infrastructures / Infrastructural Publics”.] For the past several decades, Flint, Michigan, has staggered under waves of de…
Are We All Flint? by Catherine Fennell
[This article originally appeared in Limn, Issue No. 7, “Public Infrastructures / Infrastructural Publics”.] For the past several decades, Flint, Michigan, has staggered under waves of de…
Wind Energy
By Alexander Dunlap Wind Energy is undoubtedly my favorite of all the energy systems, which retains an immense potential for ecological sustainability. This potential, however, can be utopic,…
Internet Archive builds archive copy in Canada
From http://blog.archive.org/2016/11/29/help-us-keep-the-archive-free-accessible-and-private/ by B. Kahle: … On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical chan…
Selective access or how states make #remoteness
What makes a place remote? Is remoteness that which is geographically distant from the centre of administrative, political and economic activities? Or is remoteness a construct of connectivity?…
Harvesting Ruins: The Im/Permanence of Work Camps and Reclaiming Colonized Landscapes in the Northern Alberta Oil Sands
Janelle Marie Baker, Anthropology McGill University § *All photos taken by Janelle Marie Baker Abandoned work camp in Bigstone Cree Nation territory. My Nehiwayak (Cree) friends who have the…
#Podcast Interview Round Up May-August: New Books in Anthropology – REDUX
It’s once again time for us to help your eardrums get some anthropological loving in collaboration with our dear friends, New Books in Anthropology. Below you’ll find a…
Plethora of Patrons and Programs Prompts Parking Progress
(Sorry about that headline. I could not control myself.) This fall there will be an extraordinary number of programs at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures. We hope…
Infrastructure – Peripheral Visions and Bodies that Matter: A Commentary
*A commentary on Part II of our Engagement thematic series, The Nature of Infrastructure. By Bettina Stoetzer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology § In the past few years, the…
Excavating the Chesapeake: Exploring the Intersecting Geological, Political, and Technical Layers that Constitute a Watershed
By Jeremy Trombley, University of Maryland, College Park § My research looks at the entities and interactions that constitute the Chesapeake Bay watershed – specifically the role that computational mo…
In the Sand: Water, Land, and Infrastructure in Informality
Angela Storey, University of Arizona § Milk crates are a common sight when walking the narrow paths of informal settlements in Khayelitsha, a Cape Town suburb where more…