Guest Blogger: Rine Vieth

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 lucky to have crossed paths with brilliant scholars and curious people all over the world. But, most of you haven’t met me before—so I’m very glad to meet for the first time here!

As a brief introduction, I’m a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, and my doctoral research explores how the UK asylum system assesses religious belief. I’m also a non-binary, disabled, foreign (US in Canada) grad student who works for their university’s academic casual labour union—and in my (limited) spare time, I do things like design resources for those wanting to research their own institution. I bring all this up to say that I think a lot about how we actually do the work we do, who we include, and what barriers to participation we can reduce.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about how we do the work we do, graduate student life, and other considerations for a more careful, care-filled academia. I look forward to sharing this space with y’all, and engaging with conversations about how we do the work we do—and imagining other ways of being in the world.