An Anthropology of Algorithmic Recommendation Systems
On the morning of Friday, March 10, 2023 Nick Seaver and I met over Zoom to talk about his new book Computing Taste: Algorithms and Makers of Music…
Tag: research
Invisible Labor of Health and the Spell of Productivity
When I talked with Jia, who works for an e-commerce company in Shanghai, China, she was trying to finish a “Perfect Month Challenge” on her Apple Watch. That…
Dissertation Update: “On Anthropomorphism”
I’ve sent off the first section of my dissertation to my advisor. This section is going in the introduction around the theoretical and methodological foundations of the study.Next…
Why I Study Human-Animal Relations as an Anthropologist
Anthropology is the study of humans, or as Dr. Jon Marks says: “the study of who we are and where we come from.” I consider it to be…
Grafting with Care: Encountering Human-Plant Relations Through Experiments with Roses
Introduction When seen through the experiences and histories of experimentation and care, plants such as roses can bring new insights into the affective and material entanglements of more-than-human…
If I Could Talk to the Algorithm
In the film Doctor Dolittle (1967), the title character yearns to “Talk to the Animals,” as the song goes, to understand their mysterious and often vexing ways. It…
Uncovering Ethnography in Creative Practice Research with Machines
A live performance of Oliver Bown’s Zamyatin system with clarinetist François Houle This blog post comes out of a discussion with Ritwik Banerji about the ‘hidden’ role of…
Beauty Filters: New Tech, Old Problems
Retaining a youthful appearance is a laborious and painful exercise, often rife with invisible labor. Digital beauty tech has made it much easier. Rather than altering our own…
You Are What You Grow: Crops, Cultivation, and Caste in India
The allure of the onion Fieldwork can produce odd obsessions. As an anthropologist studying agrarian risk economies, mine was onions. In the central Indian region of Malwa where…
Toxicity, Violence, and the Legacies of Mercury and Gold Mining in Colombia
Stubborn substances and toxic legacies Toxic substances are often portrayed as stubborn molecules that resist being restricted to the places where we would like to contain them in…
Making a Multispecies Community in the Texas Hill Country: AAA2022 Talk
Below is a recording of the talk I am giving in person at the 2022 annual American Anthropological Association meeting on November 10. Video of my talk
Platypod, Episode Four: Connections and Disconnections on Social Media
Platypod In this episode, Platypod presents a conversation between Baird Campbell (Rice University) and Ilana Gershon (Indiana University Bloomington). They discuss the politics of connection and disc…
LaMDA and the Limits of Sentience
In early June, Blake Lemoine, then an engineer at Google, claimed that LaMDA, a Machine Learning-based chatbot, was sentient and needed to be treated with respect. LaMDA stands…
Embracing Black Positionalities, (Re)Centring Slowness: A Challenge to Anthropology’s Anti-Racism Efforts
Anti-racism efforts remain highly problematic. As anthropologists, we are usually aware of the violent, colonial, and genocidal histories of research on ‘race’ and realities of racism which have…
Injury and Fitness: Responsibility through Biomedicine
Kashif pointed to different parts of the wounds on his leg and explained to me how they had healed, exacerbated, or been ignored at different places of care.…
“The Netherlands Meat Land” Campaign: Towards an Ethnography of Meat
By Irene Stengs On 1 September 2022, the Dutch Central Organisation for the Meat Industry (COV, Centrale Organisatie voor de Vleessector), a partnership consisting of organizations involved in…
Photoshopping Desire: Gender, Caste, and the “Authentic” Self
Screenshot of the comments for the post by @photo_paparazzo, being discussed in the blogpost In an Instagram post by a photographer @photo_paparazzo, we see what the labor of…
Bioethics Must First Burn
Bioethics must burn before it can be reimagined to enable the flourishing of all humans, and not just the ones that align with or are presupposed by its…
Platypod, Episode Two: Ableism in Anthropology and Higher Ed
In this episode, Platypod presents a conversation between Laura Heath-Stout (Brandeis University) and Rebecca-Eli Long (Purdue University). They discuss their research and experiences of ableism in ac…
Counting on Montane Birds: Biologists, Verticality, and Territorial Defense in Colombia
This piece is about the unforeseen and sometimes overlooked connection between (i) birds living in the forests of Colombia’s high tropical Andes, (ii) local biologists supporting an anti-mining…
Platypod, Episode One: Technologies and Politics of Accessibility
In its opening episode, Platypod presents a conversation between Cassandra Hartblay (University of Toronto) and Zihao Lin (University of Chicago). They discuss their research on accessibility culture…
Just in Time (how to be an anthropologist in business)
As the academic world continues its slow motion descent into financial and sometimes intellectual insolvency, some anthropologists seek employment in the world of business. The Journal of Business…
(Mis)Managing Algorithms of Hate: The Nexus of Big Tech and the State in India
This browser does not support HTML5 audio Listen to the recording of this piece by Aishani Khurana In February 2020, Delhi witnessed one of the worst inc…