Author: Guest Contributor

Quaran-Teens Class of 2021: Covid’s Impact on Social Relations

By Guest Contributor | January 7, 2021

[The following students are high school seniors Class of 2021 at “KTH School.” As part of their International Baccalaureate Social and Cultural Anthropology class, they conducted a collaborative visual auto-ethnography of their experience of hybrid schooling from August to December 2020. Each group focused on a particular conceptual theme to analyze in the blog.] By: Kewe Chen, Cristian Gonzalez, and Kortni Owens Human culture is made up of varying complex social relationships found in every social group around the world. {+}

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 {+}

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, {+}

(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 {+}

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 {+}