Tag: public scholarship

Shifting Fields of Academic Publishing

I’ve been thinking about academic publishing lately. Some of that is related to being in the middle of Michigan State University’s tenure process. It also has to do with having chaired an ad-hoc committee to revise my department’s annual review process. It also has a bit to do with Issue 30.1 of the journal Cultural Anthropology (CA) being released last week. Since graduate school, I have wandered the borderlands between Anthropology, Game Studies and Science and Technology Studies. I’ve been (somewhat oddly sometimes) employed by “communication” colleges of various sorts, in part due to Game Studies having found its most disciplinary home in such locations. But I think most importantly it has put me in conversation with a variety of approaches to and perspectives on what academic scholarly activity should/ought/might look like. Add to this my work as a game designer/developer and conversations within the institutions I inhabit how those materials should/ought to/might be evaluated. (read more...)

2014 in Review: Re-locating the Human

In retrospect, 2014 may appear a pivotal year for technological change. It was the year that “wearable” technologies began shifting from geek gadget to mass-market consumer good (including the announcement of the Apple Watch and the rising popularity of fitness trackers), that smartphone and tablet usage outstripped that of desktop PCs for accessing the Internet, along with concurrent interest in home automation and increasingly viable models for pervasive computing (such as Google’s purchase of smart thermostat Nest), and that computer algorithms, machine learning, and recommendation engines came increasingly to the fore of public awareness and debate (from Apple buying streaming service Beats to the effects of Facebook’s algorithms). Many of these shifts have been playing out world-wide, or at least, in diverse contexts, such as Chinese online retailer Alibaba going public and Xiaomi smartphone maker speedily surpassing most rivals. It also proved to be an exciting year on The CASTAC Blog, where our team of Associate Editors and contributors brought our attention to this rapidly shifting technological landscape, and to pressing questions and debates driving anthropological inquiry into science and technology. In today’s post, I continue my predecessor Patricia Lange’s tradition of reviewing themes and highlights on the blog from the past year. Some of these are topical, and included energy, the environment, and infrastructure, crowdsourcing and the “sharing” economy, wearables, algorithms and the “Internet of Things,” science communication, science’s publics, and citizen science, while others were more conceptual or even experimental—reflections on longterm ethnographic engagement with technology, broader issues of scientific (and ethnographic) authority, technological infrastructures as social infrastructures and tacit knowledges (such as Jenny Cool’s co-chair report), and broadly, how to make anthropological research into science and technology relevant within and beyond academic circles. (read more...)