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Bodies as Proxies, or The Stratigraphic Evidence of Our Appetites, at Metabolic Scales from the Human to the Planetary, on the Occasion of the Anthropocene’s Ongoing Debate About Itself

This image has two parts. The left part of the image is horizontally longer than part on the right. In the left part, the author is seen biting into a piece of kaolin clay while standing with one foot forward on a rocky uneven surface, against a background of a towering heap of whitish-pink earth excavated from a kaolin clay mine. The right part of the image shows broken solid pieces and powder of edible kaolin clay, white in colour, that is spread on the surface of a table.
Allie E.S. Wist April 3, 2025
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The atmosphere of anxiety concerning the Anthropocene amplifies when considering how its eerie and unwieldy forces affect our bodies. Across posthumanist, science studies, and new materialist discourse, the concern about corporeal impacts seems to huddle around a particular set of words: porous, permeable, vulnerable, sensitive. These are invoked as scholars seek to describe the status of bodies threatened by invisible, global, and pernicious toxins. In a looping story of strata and sediment and edible rocks, this essay similarly seeks to articulate the material instabilities of bodies in an epoch that itself resists clear definition. (read more...)

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A foot of a farmer walking on an agricultural field bedded with dry gravel that is reddish-orange. A black irrigation drip pipe, that is about 12 mm in diameter, runs horizontally on the ground and the farmer's feet is placed along the drip pipe, horizontally. The farmer is wearing a simple yellowish-orange rubber slipper that seems mildly tainted with mud. His foot has slipped off his feet as he has stepped on the drip pipe. A drop of water is dripping from the hole in the drip pipe.

Witnessing the Porous World

Misria Shaik Ali April 1, 2025
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Pores compose materials around us such as gypsum, clay, lead, concrete, whose strength and durability are paradoxically analyzed in their capacity to resist porosity, or contain. Anthropogenic engagements with pores hold this ambivalence–resisting to perceive pore as a passage into the world and reducing them to their instrumental capacity to hold and contain. (read more...)

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Following Primates

Virendra Mathur, Aarjav Chauhan March 25, 2025
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Each day weaves its own tale, and no two days unfold alike in the Mandal Valley. The Mandal Valley is like any central Himalayan valley, rich and teeming with small villages, its air soaked in the mystical scent of its culture and tradition. The landscape of the valley is a gradient of human agricultural activity merging into the surrounding forest. It is the southern entry point to the adjacent Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary (Srivastava et al., 2020). Every morning, the villagers in this valley would take up their daily chores. A script was followed. Cleaning up the cowshed and tending to the cows, walking to the forest to collect wood, dry grass, and fodder, heading to the village market or Gopeshwar, the nearest town, or working the agricultural fields. In Mandal valley, there were a handful of activities likely to happen as the day unfolded. And yet, every day would unfold (read more...)

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3D-rendered human face with a web of data points that capture and map human facial features with precision, showcasing the intersection of technology and identity.

The Limits of Identity: How Race and Gender Constructs in Biometric Technology Narrow Who We Are

Brittany Fields March 18, 2025
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This article provides a brief look into the ways identity can be constrained with regard to biometric technology.  It discusses technological limitations where biometric identification systems may fail to represent a person’s full identity, including bias in recognition as well as the inability to capture complex and changing human characteristics.  It also touches on political dimensions, where legal systems and governments may place limits on how identity is recognized and documented, particularly in the case of gender recognition. (read more...)

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Two hippos on the grassy banks of the river

Experimental Methodologies for Listening to the Present: An Interview with Alejandra Osejo-Varona

Alejandra Osejo-Varona, Karina Aranda, nicolás gaitán-albarracín March 13, 2025
Este contenido también está disponible en español.
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This Women’s History Month, we are publishing an interview with Colombian anthropologist Alejandra Osejo-Varona (Rice University). Her ethnographic work is influenced by Latin American feminist epistemologies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), so we thought it would be valuable to share her perspective on multimodal ethnographic research. Nicolás Gaitán-Albarracín and I conducted this interview via videoconference. In this conversation, Osejo-Varona tells us how she collaborates with different scientific communities to explore new ways of listening to the beings that live underwater. Technologies such as microphones, hydrophones, algorithms, model maps, and spectrograms allow us to imagine other ways of relating with the species living in rivers, especially those cataloged as “invasive” in socio-ecosystems of Colombia. These new methodological approaches open forms of collaborative and interdisciplinary work to construct new sensitivities and empathies capable of envisioning other human and non-human worlds. (read more...)

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The Politics of Civic Education 

Elif Memis March 11, 2025
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Cast Your Vote (CYV), a civic education game, aims to teach conscious voter behavior to youth, simulating a fictional election campaign. Reflecting on the relationship between humans and technology, I argue that both curriculum design and the educational software the curriculum informs are political. Critically analyzing CYV’s scenario, I discuss how representation politics shape CYV’s civics curriculum and the gameplay it provides. Focusing on CYV creators’ inclusion and exclusion decisions on societal issues, I offer some suggestions to produce a more inclusive and relevant educational experience for marginalized communities.   (read more...)

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A person walking on a landscape.

What are “Walking Simulators,” Ethnographically?

Yifan Xia March 4, 2025
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“Gaming” is conceptually branching out. It “virtually” overlaps with museum visuals and actively engages with lived cultures and heritage. Both developments point out that perhaps even with the prevalence of computation, there is still something we can learn from sociocultural anthropology, especially the anthropological ways of writing cultures – ethnography. (read more...)

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Responsible AI in Action: Beyond Policy Regimes

Cheryl Hagan February 27, 2025
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Work on Artificial Intelligence writ large has moved past laudatory excitement to one of vast critique. This recent scholarship has demonstrated the various racist and sexist biases embedded within algorithmic systems (Benjamin, 2017; Browne 2015; Noble, 2018). More recently, scholarship into AI has sought to define AI as part of longer histories of colonial exploitation and extraction (Couldry and Mejias, 2019). Others have argued for postcolonial or decolonial AI which is “about interrogating who is doing computing, where they are doing it, and, thereby, what computing means both epistemologically (that is, in relation to knowing) and ontologically (that is, in relation to being)” (Ali 2016, 20). Geographer Louise Amoore also defines AI not as the objective and all-encompassing thinking machine AI proponents claim, but instead an always already partial aperture. This method of doing ethics is not about claiming transparency, but about acknowledging the ways in which ethics, for humans and algorithms, is always emplaced and partial (Amoore, 2020). (read more...)

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