India’s Uber Dilemma: Entrepreneurship or Exploitation?
Uber is part of a “gig economy” trend in India and elsewhere—an economy partially powered by self-employed workers on short-term jobs. While it offers flexible schedules for its…
Tag: Technology
Web Roundup: Data, Safety, and Bias by Lily Shapiro
Many people probably saw the news that Facebook allegedly privileges left-leaning stories in its trending news section, a story broken by Gizmodo at the beginning of this month.…
Anthropocene Adjustments: Discarding the Technosphere
The technosphere refers to a new layer on the planet made up of “the interlinked set of communication, transportation, bureaucratic and other systems that act to metabolize fossil…
Taking up Space
Nine years ago when I started my doctoral studies not only was I in a fertile intellectual endeavour undertaking fieldwork, reading theory, stretching my brain and writing,…
Seminar: Indigenous Media 2016
Again, I have the pleasure to teach the Seminar “Indigenous Media” for the MA Program in Visual and Media Anthropology at the Free University Berlin. Find below a…
Web Roundup: The Electronic Over-Soul and our Worst Selves (and Other Mishaps) by Sara M Bergstresser
The web roundup for this month is a sequel to last month’s roundup on Mind, Consciousness, and Artificial Intelligence. I will address another interface between machines and minds,…
Book Forum––Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps by Todd Meyers
Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is a story of the influenza pandemic that never…
(Video) Games as Motivation for Japanese High School Students
By Andrew Ross Sushi served on conveyor belts. Robot restaurants and robot theater. Toilets that automatically open themselves upon room entry. For visitors of Tokyo (and to an…
Interactive reading and beyond – Creating online consensus (and possibly community) one top highlight at a time
I receive a number of emails everyday from various websites that range from teaching innovations and news about higher education to curator services like Pocket. One article set…
Review: Cooking Technology
Review of: Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz (ed.) Cooking Technology: Transformations in Culinary Practice in Mexico and Latin America (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016). Michael McDonald Florida Gulf…
Dancing “My Humps” in Rural China
Every evening in Anshan Town, a rural village in China’s Shandong province, around 25 middle-aged women gather in the small public square to dance to the Black Eyed…
Mind, Consciousness, and Artificial Intelligence by Maria Cecilia Dedios
This month’s web roundup comes through a bit late – paradoxically- due to technical difficulties (my computer died!). Although I will be able to recover most of my…
How Real Are You on Facebook?
I recently went to a wedding where a couple politely excused themselves from the reception, saying they needed to get home to relieve the babysitter. The next day…
Martin Luther King Jr., in Sapphire
There are many ways to memorialize the immortal Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the most famous and important civil rights leader of our time. Many, if not most,…
Lemon Difficult: Building a Strategic Speculation Consultancy
Joseph Lindley works with design fiction in order to facilitate meaningful speculation about the future. In between he likes to make music, take photographs and combine the other two…
#Pragmatism & the Magic Book for Nuclear Power
This is a brightly colored South Korean pro-nuclear children’s book adorned with friendly animals dancing around a light bulb in front of a nuclear power plant. The title…
Don’t panic: the smart city is here!
Ding Wang, in her own words, ‘has a special interest in pursuing degrees whose names consist of two random words’ (specifically Tourism Management, Design Ethnography, and now Dig…
Selfies | 自拍
In “Dim Stockings”, a short chapter included in his The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben takes a cue from the prosaics of a stockings advertisement to discuss the commodification…
Everybody’s an Ethnographer!
Dhruv Sharma has a background in anthropology, has worked in various countries as an ethnographer, and also holds a master’s degree in design ethnography from Dundee University. His doctoral …
What’s the matter with Ethnography?
Robert Potts is a filmmaker, lecturer, designer, and PhD candidate at the HighWire Centre for Doctoral Training who takes special interest in a diverse range of subjects including shared narr…
Piping as poison: the Flint water crisis and America’s toxic infrastructure
Over the past few decades, we have met with much success in curbing some of Americans’ exposure to lead. Yet they have struggled to contain this continuing danger…
Visual/Media/Digital Anthropology at 14th EASA Conference
Here is a list of panels at the 14th European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Biennial Conference entitled “Anthropological legacies and human futures” (Milan, 20-23 July 2016, #EASA2016)…
Paper: Interactive technology enhanced learning for social science students
Budka, P., Schallert, C., Mader, E. 2011. Interactive technology enhanced learning for social science students. In M. E. Auer & M. Huba (Eds.), Proceedings 14th International Conference on…
What on Earth is Post Disciplinary Ethnography?
This post is part of the Post Disciplinary Ethnography Edition. ‘Jargon free’ text is the name of the game according to the Ethnography Matters style guide, so titling…