Writing Life No. 19: An Interview with Jason Pine by Jason Pine
Figure 1 (Jason): Writing is painful for me. I do TRX Suspension Training with an amazing online and affordable personal trainer/physical therapist (email me and I’ll give you…
Tag: Materiality
Article: The materiality of mediated conflict & resistance
Budka, P., & Bräuchler, B. (2022). The materiality of mediated conflict and resistance. In Media Res: A Media Commons Project – Theme Week “Critical Media Forensics”, 11 Feb.…
Fetishes or Cyborgs? Religion as technology in the Afro-Atlantic space
(Editor’s Note: This blog post is part of the Thematic Series Data Swarms Revisited) Exú, the trickster god, Axé Ilé Oba – São Paulo (photo by Giovanna Capponi)…
Coal, Care, and Climate change: When Things Remember What People Forget
As the US moves toward greener energy futures, how we remember coal – or do not – has significant implications for how we create more just energy transitions.…
Atmospheric Failure
Fog catchers (atrapanieblas) are fairly simple constructions. They consist of large plastic or nylon nets stretched between two vertically positioned poles, perpendicular to the direction of the incom…
Surveillant Materialities of Migrant (Im)mobility: Reconceptualizing Border Technologies
After lunch on the day I arrived at Casa Begoña Migrant Shelter in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, México, Doña Paquita, a shelter director, came to fetch me from the comedor,…
Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth takes the p. 99 test
Opening to page 99 of Finding the Singing Spruce: Craft Labor, Global Forests, and Musical Instrument Makers in Appalachia, you’ll find my reflections on choosing apprenticeship as the ethnographic…
Architecture as/and Infrastructure #Roadsides
Over the past two decades, infrastructure has emerged as a central concept in a larger conversation about architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Providing citizens with reliable infrastructure systems…
The Server Souvenir: Taking Home Remnants of Virtual Worlds
“It’s amazing to think those little circuits that we can carry around were an entire world to us.” –Diana*, interviewee “We might say that this capacity of objects…
Anthropology…in Theory
Bernard Perley © 2019 Bernard Perley is Maliseet from Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada. He teaches courses in linguistic anthropology and Native American studies at the…
Materiality of Research: The General Theory of Failure: Thoughts on the Material Culture of Failure by Timothy Carroll, David (Jeeva) Jeevendrampillai and Aaron Parkhurst
In this feature essay, Timothy Carroll, David (Jeeva) Jeevendrampillai and Aaron Parkhurst introduce recent edited collection, The Material Culture of Failure: When Things Do Wrong (Bloomsbury, 2017),…
The fool with the watering can, or asynchronous time travelling by Jeannette Pols
One of the most bewildering and fascinating things about spending time with people with dementia is that they can rapidly travel through time. This was most clear with…
To Dwell in Seams
Fashion as Buried Forms of Diasporic Memory I keep returning this one memory. As a kid, I go down the steps to the basement of my parent’s New…
The Impossibility of the Inert: Placebo and the Essence of Healing by Thomas J. Csordas
The concept of placebo is predicated on the opposition between active and inert, deploying this opposition to assert that an action or substance with no inherent active principle…
Materiality and politics in Latin America.
Via Ricardo Andres Labra Mocarquer Symposium in Santiago, Chile. November. The way “things” are analyzed in the contemporary world had changed, from antiquarians to different approaches…
Notes from the Forest: Engaging with a hunter’s world of materials
Thorsten Gieser, Lecturer in Anthropology, Department of Kulturwissenschaft, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany A winter’s day, in a forest in central Germany. At dusk, more than fifty hunte…
Digital Materialities: Design and Anthropology, Edited by S. Pink, E. Ardevol, and D. Lanzeni
Zachary Hecht, UCL Digital Anthropology I must admit, this review has been a long time coming. I was given Digital Materialities and asked to review it many…
Musings on the Materiality of Health Care by Cristina A. Pop
Nightstand in a psychiatry hospital from Alba-Iulia, Romania. The picture was taken by Odeta Catana in November 2014, as part of a project initiated by the Center for…
Connecting Materialities / Material Connectivities
International Symposium at the Center for Advanced Studies (CAS), LMU Munich, 9–11 February 2017 Convened by PHILIPP SCHORCH AND MARTIN SAXER Call for Papers Deadline: 31 October 2016…
Book Review: My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries by Elizabeth Chin
Haidy Geismar, UCL Anthropology My Life With Things: The Consumer Diaries by Elizabeth Chin, 2016. Duke University Press. My Life with Things is an engaging, quirky, auto-ethnography detailing key…
Broken Stories
Adam Drazin, UCL Anthropology How, when and why do people start to see something as”broken”? Do objects around the home just have two states, broken and working, or…