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…
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…
(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,…
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 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…
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’…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Review of Tania Lewis. Digital Food: From Paddock to Platform. Bloomsbury Academic. London. 2020. ISBN: 978-1-3500-5509-4. 205 pp. Richard Zimmer (Sonoma State University) Tania Lewis has wr…
On page 99, I get to the Kodak. The fixed focus, single aperture lens camera was patented 1888, and it sold for the not insignificant price of twenty-five…
View of Pentecost. © Hannah Sibona By Hannah Sibona In 2020, a face-to-face meeting, more often than not, means screen-to-screen. The global pandemic, social restrictions, and the ‘new…
With Covid-19 showing no sign of abating, mental health care (from ongoing therapy to helplines) continues to be an important site of treatment for many Americans. While traditional…
Researchers found these ancient flint blades in Israel’s Qesem Cave. Filipe Natalio Humanity’s creation and mastery of fire likely came in stages. Being able to reliably kindle this…
A Future History of Water By Andrea Ballestero, Rice University 248pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press § Colin Hoag spoke with Prof. Andrea Ballestero about her recent book…