(Nota: Esta publicación está disponible en español aquí.) In early June 2019, news began to break concerning the death of a Salvadoran transgender woman, Johana Medina León, of…
The Wellcome Trust has recently (yesterday) released the 2018 Global Monitor, a 140,000 people survey on how ‘people around the world think and feel about science and major…
A proposed redesign of the original pride flag, centering the inclusion of marginalized communities within the queer community. Design by Daniel Quasar. In support and solidarity with LGBTQIA+/Queer…
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OccupyHandSignals.pdf For the MA Program “Visual and Media Anthropology” at the Free University Berlin, I am organizing a newly developed semi…
Naming can dignify, disparage or even deny one’s social standing. Days after the horrific attack on the Christchurch mosque in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke about…
Budka, P. (2019). Indigenous media technologies in “the digital age”: Cultural articulation, digital practices, and sociopolitical concepts. In S. S. Yu & M. D. Matsaganis (Eds.), …
Editor’s Note: This post was co-written with Timothy Gitzen. When is a face not a face? With the launch of the iPhone X that boasts facial recognition capabilities,…
Online misinformation, fake news, false news, hoaxes, you name it, has been blamed for almost everything bad happening in the last years, from the success of Trump to…
Dieser Text wurde 2017 für den Blog der Universität Wien geschrieben; für eine überarbeitete und erweiterte Version des Textes siehe Budka, P. 2019. Von der Cyber Anthropologie zur…
OCTOBER Where US–Canada relations were concerned, as well as Trump’s trade strategy, NAFTA was the leading event opening the month of October. The US–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) On Monday,…
In the first wake of the Egyptian uprisings, and their framing as a “Facebook” revolution or Twitter revolution or “social media revolution” there was a lot of Utopian discours…
As the year winds down, Anthropology News rounds up our most popular articles of 2018. From critical reflections on the discipline and experiences of it, to grappling with…
Back in 2012 I blogged about MidEast Tunes (mideasttunes.com) one of the largest Arabic music sites in the world. I just updated my old post to fix the…
Budka, P. (2018). The anthropology of digital visuality: Notes on comparison, context and relationality. Paper at Vienna Anthropology Days 2018 (VANDA2018), Vienna, Austria: University of Vienna, 20 S…
With #inktober now in its 10th year, Author Katherine Cook explains the on-going success of the campaign, and discusses the evolution of #archink. As instructors, we often have rather lofty…
There is a joke among pilots—of course, I never heard any pilot actually saying the joke, but I found it online in plenty of commentaries about automation—according to…
Este contenido está disponible en español aquí. *Many of the names and places mentioned below have been changed.* While the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or Revolutionary…
Udupa, S., Costa, E., & Budka, P. (2018) The digital turn: New directions in media anthropology. Discussion Paper for the Follow-Up E-Seminar on the EASA Media Anthropology Network…
Next month, I will give two talks – or two versions of the same talk – on “Cognitive attraction and online misinformation”. One will be in Den Bosch…
Both internet users and market regulators are becoming more concerned about who uses personal data and how. The recent events involving Cambridge Analytica have helped to raise the…
In Ghana, the creative culture and the contemporary art sphere is in a period of exponential growth and reconfiguration. Across Accra and Kumasi, the contemporary creative scene has…
PANEL “DIGITAL VISUALITY” @ Vienna Anthropology Days (VANDA) 2018 (September 19-22, 2018) Convenors: Elke Mader & Philipp Budka Thursday, 20 September 11:00-17:00 Room 4 (New Institute Building (…
The “memeification” of political discourse in the 2018 Mexican presidential elections. Brandon Hunter-Pazzara “Okay, let’s start the memes,” posted a member of a community Facebook page in the…
[This post is adapted and updated from a paper presented at the University of Colorado, Boulder graduate student conference, “The Ethnographic Turn” in 2016. I am indebted to…