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’…
Tag: Technology
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…
Review: Digital Food
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…
Ali Feser takes the page 99 test
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…
Communication at a distance: technology old and new
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…
The Third Choice: Suicide Hotlines, Psychiatry, and the Police by Hannah Zeavin
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…
Early Humans Controlled Fire to Make Stone Tools
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: An Interview with Andrea Ballestero
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…
Interview: On COVID-19 & digital technologies in everyday life
In May 2020, I was asked by the European Science-Media Hub of the European Parliament to participate in a short written interview about COVID-19 and digital technologies in…
Can a Robot Guess What You’re Thinking?
What on earth are you thinking? Other people think they know, and many could make a pretty decent guess, simply from observing your behavior for a short while.…
Indigenous-led technology can boost biodiversity and ensure human rights
Simon Hoyte, Alice Sheppard, Marcos Moreu, Megan Laws & Jerome Lewis Extreme Citizen Science Research Group Over recent years there have been high profile legal challenges, investigative…
#Review: Meat Planet
If the proponents of cultured meat are to be believed we might be soon headed towards a future in which bioreactors replace, or at least exist alongside, industrial…
Health Technology Assessments: the metrical evangelization of UHC in India by Robert D. Smith
Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes. “Health for…