Ethnographic Film at the Crossroads
Ethnographic film is blooming Ethnographic film, however loosely defined, is blooming. While to track and map the entire production of ethnographic film appears next-to impossible, I want to…
Tag: Technology
Amazon Sidewalk Needs our Trust for its Security
On June 8, 2021, Amazon deployed an “opt-in” way for people to enable the company to expand its private network into communities, creating infrastructure to peddle even more…
Like, Share, Comment, and Follow: Labor and Capital on Instagram
Screenshot of the Instagram profile of the influencer discussed in the blog. Social media content creator Ishita Mangal (@ishitamangal) uploaded a post with multiple slides on her Instagram…
Mediated Intimacies: Teletherapy and the Changing Face of American Mental Healthcare by Rebecca J. Lester
“Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?” “I can, but your head is cut off. I just see your neck. Can you hear me?” “Yeah, yeah, I hear you. &nb…
Days of Their Lives: The Limits, Possibilities, and Parallels of Media-Ted Research during a Pandemic
On a regular day, a Hindi soap opera production set in Mumbai is home to upwards of 100 artists and technicians – production associates, actors, make-up artists, costume…
Not “just tools”: The framework of equivalence and cochlear implants in Jordan by Timothy Y. Loh
“Should all deaf children learn sign language?” This seemingly innocuous question was the theme of a roundtable article published in the influential journal Pediatrics in 2015, which compiled…
‘Silicon health’ for Africa: Understanding the rise and impact of drone logistics by René Umlauf
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones, are on the rise. During the ongoing corona crisis their potential to either monitor curfews or to provide contactless deliveries…
Mediating Mobility: Migration and Brokerage at the Borders of the State
Natasha Raheja (Cornell University) will present on ‘Mediating mobility: Migration and brokerage at the borders of the State’. Elizabeth Challinor (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) will ac…
Multiple Modes of Being Human
(Editor’s Note: This blog post is part of the Thematic Series Data Swarms Revisited) Evolution (photo by and copyright of Oliver Berger) In the last couple of years,…
Totalizing Infrastructures: Statecraft in the Uyghur Penal Colony
There were three lanes at the checkpoint in Turpan—an old Uyghur-majority oasis city on the northern reaches of the Taklamakan Desert in Northwest China. Two lanes were fitted…
A Sandbox for a Specific Type of Narcissist – Clubhouse, the Allure of Live Audio and Dangerous Rabbit Holes
A nasal voice is rambling on in a long monologue about how to best pitch a startup on Clubhouse when I log on sometime in March. It is…
Entrepreneurship and Technologies
Everyone is an entrepreneur – a new ethos is sweeping through our economic world. While the promises of ‘being your own boss’ and ‘deciding about your working hours’…
Why a Mexican Village’s DIY Cellphone Network Matters
A campesino checks his cellphone while working in the fields outside of Talea de Castro, Mexico (the mountain village in the distance on the upper left). Agustine Sacha…
Airbnb’s Location Ratings as Anti-Black Spatial Disinvestment in Washington D.C.
In 2016, Airbnb host Synta Keeling appeared on NPR’s Hidden Brain to share her story of hosting as a Black woman living east of the Anacostia River. She…
(Re)Assembling Asias through Science
Call for contributions! Over the past two decades, a proliferation of critiques have emerged from a body of critical inter-asian scholarship to challenge, revise, and situate the conventional…
Form, Content, Data, Bodies: Jonathan Zong and Beth Semel on Biometric Sans by Jonathan Zong
The dominant discourse surrounding digital psy technologies such as MindStrong, a teletherapy app designed to detect mental health changes by monitoring changes in typing speed “down to the…
Indian Food Delivery Networks During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Over the past decade, the concept of the gig economy has gained momentum in academic discourse. Often linked to temporary employment created by multinational technological corporations through digital…
Jenny L. Davis on her book, How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things
Interview by Kevin Laddapong https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-artifacts-afford Kevin Laddapong: Reading How Artifacts Afford is very refreshing. You have proposed a way forward for analys…
The Dawn of CRISPR Mutants
The China National GeneBank in Shenzhen opened in 2016 with the goal of storing and researching millions of genetic samples from humans, animals, plants, and microbes. Eben Kirksey…
Call for research: How does digital surveillance change society?
Not only when we are reading the news, but also when we are on Zoom-conferences, sending messages with Whatsapp, playing silly games on our mobile or when we…
Decolonising protected areas: Sapelli in eastern Cameroon
In 2018, the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar remarked: We are facing modern problems for which there are no longer modern solutions What he’s referring to is that the…
The Coastal Edge
New technologies are refortifying our coastlines against anthropogenic climate change, drawing our water edgelands near and making them tangible and perhaps valuable. Edgelands, those ignored yet sym…
Anthropologist counters Zoom-fatigue: "Your next video conference might resemble a video game"
Why can we spend hours playing video games while many of us get exhausted by much shorter video-conferences? That is without doubt no bad question that the magazine…
Window Work: Framing Eldercare in the Age of COVID-19 by Kristina Grünenberg
In this blogpost, we draw from our current fieldwork on the island of Ærø, a place which has branded itself as “the digital island”[1], to explore how care…