Uzbekistan 2015: Year in Review
It was another rough year for Uzbekistan, with entrenched corruption, forced cotton labor, and an economy weakened by the Russian remittance crisis among the key trends. My report for Nations…
Tag: Uncategorized
How to manage many stakeholders
A note on style: I wrote this in a hotel room somewhere. I used Scapple from Literature and Latte to do it. It was really just a note…
“Anthropology for peace”
In the Communications Unit at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) where I work, there are posters from an old engagement campaign that read “_____ for peace.” The…
A different kind of pilgrimage
Photograph by Neil Rickards By Dimetri Whitfield The most surprising thing for me about conducting fieldwork is that you encounter all these interesting people that ultimately do…
废俗 | Junklore
“Redundant information, calculated as, say, the number of stickers in corners, on walls, on lampposts that it takes to build cognizance of this information in one subject, may…
New Piece: Review Essay
The wonderful team at Somatosphere just published my review essay on three recent – and quite important – books on disability themes. “When Risk, Doubt, and Difference Converge:…
How a town based on Superman fell for Trump
Most articles about why people vote for Donald Trump get their answers from two places: polls, with no follow-up questions but lots of speculation as to the “real…
Ayahuasca Art: The Nature of Marriage and the Marriage of Nature
I have been told time and again by countless ayahuasca drinkers that the experience of ayahuasca is ultimately beyond words. These impenetrable descriptions are nonetheless usually followed by…
Winter/Spring Journal Round-Up
American Anthropologist Interspecies Semiotics and the Specter of Taboo: The Perception and Interpretation of Dogs and Rabies in Bali,Indonesia Yancey Orr The anthropological fields of ethnobiology and…
34. In search of psychedelia: for a technopolitics beyond institutions
This is the thirty-fourth post in the freedom technologists series This past March 2016 I spent three weeks in Lima (Peru), as well as a few days in…
Trump protests and media exploitation
For the Globe and Mail, I wrote about anti-Trump protests and the potential danger of cable news exploitation as they become increasingly violent. An excerpt: Mr. Trump’s seeming…
Flight 1095
Coming home from Phoenix on Friday, I found myself sharing the plane with Aidy Bryant, Vanessa Bayer, and Bret Stephens. Bryant and Bayer are SNL players. Stephens (below) is Foreign…
Collaborative PhD Studentship – Workplace Design in the Digital Age
UCL Department Anthropology Project Workplace Design in the Digital Age Duration of studentship 3.5 years (to start 01 Oc…
Adulting: Because Being a Grownup Should Only Be a Temporary Affliction
I remember being a kid trying to figure out what set adults apart from the rest of the masses of “watery moles” (Thanks, Florence King, for that reference…
What’s Fueling “The Bern?” The Secret Every Marketer Should Know
Yet another view into the world of a “professional” narcissistic anthropologist at work. Posted this morning on the company site / linkedin. On a side note, I was…
Tactics of Power and Empowerment in Knowledge-Making Infrastructures
By Kirk Jalbert, Manager of Community Based Research & Engagement, FracTracker Alliance and Visiting Research Professor, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Drexel University § Energy extr…
33. Iñigo Errejón: Podemos as an emergent cultural practice
Photo credit: ca.wikipedia.org This is the thirty-third post in the freedom technologists series I have pasted below some highlights (in Spanish) of an excellent interview with Podemos’ ‘…
Is there an Ontology to the Digital
On another digital note, I am really pleased to see the fantastic Digital Ontology collection of essays that Antonia and I collated is now up on the Cultural…
Digital Infrastructure course blog
I’ve been running a course at UCL this term called Digital Infrastructure: Materiality, Information, Politics and the students have been uploading blog posts each week on an infrastructure…
Donna Haraway’s new book: Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chtulucene
Donna Haraway’s new book is out in September with Duke University Press: Description In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers prov…
Trumpmenbashi: Central Asian dictatorship and American tabloid spectacle
My first article for The Diplomat is on the parallels between Donald Trump and the leaders of Central Asian authoritarian states: In January, shortly before he began sweeping…