This summer I started a new job. My former position, in museums and special collections, was grant funded. We worked that contract until the money was gone. And though I like to think they wished they could keep me, budgets at non-profits are extraordinarily tight. I was back on the job market. Out of ten job apps sent to a wide variety of different institutions I got one interview at a public library, that blossomed into an offer and the {+}
By Michaela D.E. Meyer I grew up in a small farm community in Nebraska. Our food intake relied largely on what our farm (or neighbor’s farms) produced – beef, pork, corn, soybeans. Farming culture followed a very specific food rhythm – load up as much caloric intake as possible in the morning, work all day in the fields, and then power load again in the evening at dinner. I wasn’t the biggest fan of that traditional “farm-to-table” schedule. I tend {+}
In Designs for the Pluriverse : Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, theorist and distinguished critic of development Arturo Escobar joins a chorus of works that seek to articulate the recent ontological turn with our shared global, ecological crisis. As I made my way through this challenging and well written work, I came to feel as if theoretical discourses on ontology, something I am curious about but which lies outside my area of expertise, sharpened into focus. Escobar {+}
By Angela Glaros I have been reading cookbooks since childhood (along with Heloise’s Household Hints, another leisure reading genre). Much later, when I began studying anthropology, cooking and keeping house seemed like essential areas of ethnographic focus, regardless of the purported topic of one’s study. While I did my dissertation fieldwork on a small Greek island, it was my mother who had unwittingly first exposed me to ethnographic modes of inquiry back in 1981, on our first visit with our {+}
The start of the semester is just about upon us, which probably means you are rapidly ditching your best laid plans to lovingly craft your syllabus into a gleaming gem of radical pedagogical genius and coming to terms with the Winnicottian spirit of “good enough.” Welcome back. The good news is that there is one easy addition that can make every syllabus shine a little brighter, something every good enough syllabus needs (and every kick ass syllabus has) that, thanks {+}
You never know when or how new research will begin. Let alone how you’re going to do it. That’s why it’s always good to take notes…and photographs. In March 2012, when I was in the middle of my doctoral work in Cabo Pulmo, I just happened to map the coastal profile of a nearby beach (known as “Los Frailes”). It’s a long, sandy stretch of beach that curves around a small bay. I walked along the edge of the waterline {+}
A recent conversation on #AcademicTwitter has been about the #HiddenCurriculum, that is, all the things that you’re expected to know but are never formally taught or the hidden tricks and hacks to help you succeed in academia. In anthropology, the #HiddenCurriculum is deep. Proposal writing, research methods, and data analysis are rarely taught as courses. Writing conference presentations and abstracts, writing and submitting article manuscripts for peer review, writing book reviews, and writing a CV are generally mentored activities, if {+}
This series – #ROR2018 – has taken a backseat for several months. I’ve been mostly active on Twitter while I navigate state bureaucracies, assemble a research team, begin the process of data collection, management, and analysis, build a house, do my part to getting Footnotes off the ground, deal with #hautalk, fast for Ramadan, and focus on my visiting partner. Things have been hectic, but I found a fleeting moment to address something. Recently, I received an email from a {+}
Many libertarians in Silicon Valley are advocates for permissionless innovation. They eschew waiting around for permission from a nanny state. They are impatient and see themselves above the law. On the one hand you can understand this. They have a good idea, a good product and they want to roll it out, people want to use, it may create jobs, for instance with Grab in Indonesia, which has created 10,000 of jobs in delivery. This approach makes sense perhaps for {+}
By Daniel Miller Of all the bad habits I have passed on to my daughter, reading at the dinner table is the one I am least ashamed of. It puts a damper on conversation, but it ensures the appropriate caloric intake, and so it goes. Her end of the table is stacked with Harry Potter novels, Calvin and Hobbes, and Raina Telgemeier books. My end of the table is stacked with cookbooks. It’s been a long running joke in my {+}