anthro{dendum}

Quaran-Teens 2020: Reflections on Teaching Auto-Ethnography to Quaran-Teens 2020

By Guest Contributor | June 29, 2020

By Dr. Rebecca Hodges When the coronavirus epidemic response made us close campus, we switched to virtual school for the rest of the year. After their final International Baccalaureate exams were cancelled, my high school seniors taking IB Social and Cultural Anthropology decided they would like to do an auto-ethnography of their life in coronavirus quarantine. They collected data for three weeks (including photographs, screenshots of social media and virtual school, interviews, and personal reflections) and wrote anthropological analyses focused {+}

Quaran-Teens 2020: Changes Because of Quarantine

By Guest Contributor | June 22, 2020

[The following students are high school seniors at “KTH School” taking International Baccalaureate Social and Cultural Anthropology. After their final IB exams were cancelled, they decided they would like to do an auto-ethnography of their life in coronavirus quarantine. They have collected data for three weeks (including photographs, screenshots of social media and virtual school, interviews, and personal reflections) and written anthropological analyses focused on different terms (communication, society, belonging, materiality, classification, the body, health, and conflict).] By Orli Katz, {+}

Like talking to a door: Thoughts on the interactional and semiotic dynamics of an office door

By Sarah Shulist | June 22, 2020

This post is Part 2 in a short series covering some of my thoughts on a recent story about University of Alberta professor Kathleen Lowrey, whose “gender critical” views were central to her being removed from a departmental service role. For the details of the event itself, see Part 1. One curious aspect about the way that Lowrey has framed the events leading up to her removal is that she suggests people have “scoured” her social media feeds as part {+}

(E)thnographic Correspondence and Collaborative Improvisation

By Guest Contributor | June 19, 2020

by Joelle Powe, Thea McRae, Christina Jones and Laith A. Ayogu. This piece emerged from our experiences as a group of four students in an undergraduate anthropology methods course at Bard College, “Doing Ethnography.” In response to changing circumstances that rendered more conventional face-to-face forms of engagement—presumed by our methods curriculum—no longer possible, we undertook a collective reconstitution of our ethnographic projects, launching a (web)site as a platform for improvisation. This platform allowed us, and other contributors, to make sense of {+}

Academic labour and academic freedom: What does it mean to be ‘fired’?

By Sarah Shulist | June 18, 2020

While The-Author-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named has been the most prominent example of a public figure going all-in on a so-called “gender critical” argument that works to essentially justify transphobia, over here in the tiny world of academic anthropology, we have had our own example. Happy Pride Month, y’all. The background on this story concerns Kathleen Lowrey, a tenured associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, who was removed from her role as departmental Associate Chair of Undergraduate Programs after serving one {+}

Wording sociality and health: COVID-19’s lexicon revisited

By Elena Burgos Martinez | June 15, 2020

Anthr{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Elena Burgos Martinez. It is all a matter of words. The recent emergence of a wealth of COVID-19-related material shows that we all narrate this crisis. Daily concepts are de-constructed and re-constructed, re-produced and co-produced and, as users, we all inhabit the realms of terminology. But when parlance fails us, when the linguistic spaces of public inquiry fail to accommodate the sophistication of linguistic diversity, then what? Situated beyond the dualism of academia and policy, this {+}

Quaran-Teens 2020: Cultural Impact on Health

By Guest Contributor | June 15, 2020

More than arm’s length: reimagining rituals in a technologically mediated pandemic-centric era

By Guest Contributor | June 13, 2020

Anthrodendum welcomes guest blogger Dr. Caitlin E. McDonald, a digital anthropologist at Leading Edge Forum, a technology industry research organization, and a trustee for Ellpha Citizen, a charity leveraging the power of data science and AI to create a more gender balanced world, faster. Caitlin earned her PhD following dancers around the world and across the internet, understanding how information flows for cultural bodies of knowledge like dance are impacted by technoscapes (the digital world around us). @cmcd_phd on Twitter. {+}

Home, Work, Homework, and Fieldwork

By Guest Contributor | June 12, 2020

by Yukun Zeng (Fieldwork in a Time of Coronavirus series) China was the first country hit by COVID-19. Due to the government-enforced Wuhan lockdown and strict self-isolation, most Chinese people—including me—have stayed at home since January, becoming pandemic spectators, both national and global: reading news, watching the case numbers waxing and waning. In this spectatorship, only macro-scale actors like governments and WHO seem to do the real work. As China’s situation has improved, and China became seen as an expert {+}

The Social Meanings of Food in a COVID-19 World

By Guest Contributor | June 11, 2020

Anthrodendum welcomes guest blogger Rituparna Patgiri, a doctoral student in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS) at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She is interested in Cultural Sociology and her MPhil work was on the social nature of food in India. She has published her research work on food in the Graduate Journal of Food Studies, Allegra lab, Digest, and Youth Ki Awaaz. The Social Meanings of Food in a COVID-19 World by Rituparna Patgiri The global {+}