Category: Guest blogger

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. {+}

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 {+}

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, {+}

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. {+}

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 {+}