It is with excitement and regret that I announce today that this will be my last post for Anthrodendum. I’m leaving the blog. It’s hard to leave something you love, especially when you’ve done it a long time. So I feel a certain regret in leaving the blog. But I’m excited too. Academics very rarely have the opportunity to un-volunteer themselves from a service position, and these days as I hit my mid-career stride I face serious demands on my {+}
At the end of my sixth semester as an anthropology professor, I’m reflecting on what it means to inhabit this discipline (or, maybe, to occupy (re-occupy?) it). I have spent the better part of the last 8 years immersed in anthropological theory, anthropological politics, and engaging and interlocuting with the ghosts of the discipline’s past. And, to be honest, this work wears away at my cells, my fibres, my bones. I’m exhausted. I have aged. I recently joked in a {+}
2Anthropologists — especially American anthropologists — fret endlessly that they are not doing enough to make their work more widely known, their opinions more widely shared, and their impact more deeply felt. In some sense, we have less and less to worry about. Anthropology twitter is rich and active, and there are more websites about anthropology than there ever have been before. With the arrival of Sapiens in 2016 anthropology has a full-time high-quality popular journalism presence, and last year saw {+}
By: Dána-Ain Davis One night in early 2018, a doula-friend of mine, Josie who is white, sent me a photo of a Black woman sitting in a wheelchair. A doula is a person who provides support during pregnancy and post-partum care. The woman’s name was Michelle. Michelle was both Josie’s friend and her client. The photo was taken as she had arrived at the hospital because she was in labor. Michelle looked beautiful sitting in the wheelchair. She was smiling. {+}
Ninety percent of the time if you were to read a blog post about academics and politics it would be a rant about “identity politics.” This isn’t going to be that kind of post. No, what I’m talking about here are “academic politics” in general. Since academic politics might involve trying to get an academic institution to change to be more inclusive there is obviously some overlap between the two, but academic politics might just as well be about funding {+}
Today marks 40 days since Saba Mahmood’s passing. In my family culture and tradition, 40 days after death is an important marker of passage, of coping, of figuring out how you will move on… for both those who have passed and those who experienced the loss. To mark this moment, on behalf of Anthrodendum, I invited scholars representing diverse stages in their own careers, each of whom has a different relationship to Saba and her work. As a collection of notes, these {+}
Jan Chipchase is a leading design researcher. Some of you may have come across his work on the anthropology of mobile phones. I discovered it by chance while flicking through a copy of Wired magazine some years back. That Wired piece became a core reading for students when I taught a Business Anthropology module at Manchester. It opened my eyes to a wider world of anthropology. Jan has extensive experience of working with interdisciplinary teams to carry out field based {+}
We got an inch of snow yesterday in Chicago and it’s going to be in the 70s tomorrow, so I don’t know how to dress anymore. However, this will not stop me from getting you your monthly gift of articles to read my loyal dendrites! Museums in the 1800’s often traded objects with each in order to grow their collections, even with culturally significant objects. Atlas Obscura takes an examination on how anthropologists helped gather these objects for museums and what anthropologists are doing now {+}
By Anar Parikh [The following essay emerges from conversation with fellow PhD student and AES/SVA attendee, Scott Ross (George Washington University).] How is it that a senior anthropologist used the n-word during a plenary lecture and no one is talking about it? At last month’s American Ethnological Society Spring Conference in Philadelphia, Sherry Ortner delivered one of three keynote lectures, titled “Documenting Newark: Violent Resemblances.” Whereas much of Ortner’s work during the past two decades has focused on conceptualizing and {+}
Many social scientists purchase expensive qualitative data analysis software to code their field notes and interview data, but I want to show how you can accomplish the same thing for free using Dynalist or Workflowy. Neither app is truly free, but they both offer generous free plans that allow you to do a lot before you would need to pay for a subscription. We are also going to ignore most of the features offered by these apps, such as outlining, {+}