anthro{dendum}

Gone in a Quibi: A case for anthropology in business?

By Christian Elliott | November 1, 2020

Quibi’s demise—just six months after the premium short-form smartphone-focused streaming service went live—made headlines last week. Company founder (and former head of Walt Disney Studios) Jeffrey Katzenberg claimed the COVID-19 pandemic held sole responsibility for Quibi’s $1.8 billion failure. As is usually the case, the reality is much more complicated. The Quibi fiasco makes a good case, I think, for ethnographic research in business. When Quibi launched in early April, my senior year of college had just moved online. Like {+}

I’ve Never Met Anyone Like Me, But Anthropologists (Not Me) Study People Like Me, Or: What if we trans/non-binary people weren’t just your objects of study?

By Rine | October 7, 2020

cw: transphobia, mention of suicide and murder I started writing this piece in June. It was during Pride month, amidst JK Rowling’s ongoing public transphobia, and the same time as I was getting occasional news alerts about Trumpian cuts to protections around trans healthcare. It was also amidst some discussion here in Canada about Prof. Kathleen Lowery, a professor whose workload was shifted after complaints about her transphobia. Prof. Sarah Shulist covered a fair amount of the news around Prof. {+}

Collaborative Ecologies: Anthropologies of (and for) Survival in the More-Than-Human City

By Guest Contributor | October 6, 2020

Anthro{dendum} welcomes guest contributors Noah Theriault and Alex Nading. Noah is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. Alex is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. In cities around the world, waste-management systems depend both on the labor of officially sanctioned garbage collectors and on that of “informal” garbage pickers who gather and sell recyclables. In 2008, garbage pickers in and around the Nicaraguan capital of Managua began to organize. Their livelihoods were {+}

The Government of Beans – [book review]

By Guest Contributor | October 5, 2020

Anthrodendum welcomes guest blogger, V.M. Roberts, a PhD student at York University. He studies industrialization, agriculture, and the experience of machine operation from an interdisciplinary perspective. His current project focuses on the operators of mobile steam engines in historical Southern Ontario, but he can also be found firing modern, scale, and heritage steam engines with Ontario’s energetic community of hobbyists and aficionados. Hetherington, Kregg. 2020 The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops. Duke University press. Review {+}

On Gutters and Ethnography

By Rine | September 24, 2020

In a departure from more conventional communication methods in academia, I’m exploring how comics–a medium I love to read and am learning to make (thank you to my teacher in pre-pandemic times, Julian Peters!)–speak to ethnographic practice. In particular, I am wrestling with how the gutter between comics panels is something to consider in terms of ethnographic narratives. The work I refer to below is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which is an excellent resource for comics artists and readers alike. {+}

Guest Blogger: Rine Vieth

By Rine | September 20, 2020

Anthro{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Rine Vieth. Hello, Anthrodendum readers! I’m excited to be a guest blogger for Anthrodendum for the next bit. Some of you might know me from Twitter, while others of you might have seen a comic I made about plants, grief, and borders. Others might have seen my writing about disability and fieldwork. I’ve also moved around a lot, completing degrees in the US (Colby), the UK (SOAS and LSE), and now Canada (McGill), so I feel {+}

“Proving” the language/culture connection

By Sarah Shulist | August 24, 2020

Over the weekend, several anthropologist called attention to this research report produced by Princeton University (link to full report here). The headline touts the research with the claim that “Machine Learning reveals role of culture in shaping the meaning of words”. My response, and that of many others, was immediately snarky – we didn’t particularly need computers to tell us something that has been amply demonstrated by the entire field of linguistic anthropology for the better part of a century, {+}

A College Community of (COVID) Consociated Contemporaries

By Guest Contributor | August 19, 2020

Anthrodendum welcomes back guest blogger Christian Elliott, a recent graduate in cultural anthropology at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. A College Community of (COVID) Consociated Contemporaries by Christian Elliott On Thursday, March 12th, I piled into a rental van with a dozen other student writing tutors from Augustana, a small liberal arts college in western Illinois. We were bound for the Midwest Writing Center Association’s annual conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. After a few hours of cornfield-lined interstate, we {+}

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, {+}