Category: News, Links, and Pointers

2013 Diana Forsythe Prize Winner: Heather Paxson for The Life of Cheese

Jennifer Cool July 8, 2013

From Marcia Inhorn, Chair, 2013 Forsythe Prize Committee The Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) and the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC), a committee of the General Anthropology Division (GAD), announce Heather Paxson as the winner of the 2013 Diana Forsythe Prize for her book, The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (University of California Press, 2012) Paxson’s book is a true exemplar of an award made “in the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science and/or technology, including biomedicine.” The Life of Cheese is a stunning ethnographic foray into the emergence of the artisanal cheese-making movement in America, based on in-depth ethnography in three states (Vermont, Wisconsin, and California). It shows clearly how craft cheese-making has always been a part of Swiss and German immigrant food histories in the US, but how the 1960s emergence of an (read more...)

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DIY and the Future of Photojournalism (mini-CFP)

Jennifer Cool July 3, 2013

Two weeks ago, I answered a CFP from the Incoming Editor of Anthropology Now, Maria Vesperi, seeking short responses to a news story about the recent lay-off of photojournalists at the Chicago Sun Times. My piece, The Dark Side of DIY in Photojournalism and Photographic Ethnography came out this week. In keeping with the CFP, I wrote the piece from the perspective of visual anthropology but the issues surrounding the Sun Times decision to eliminate their entire photojournalism staff are ones that will be familiar to CASTAC colleagues working in computing and new media. The role of computing in the changing character of work in post-industrial economies has been a focus in social research on information technology at least since Shoshana Zuboff’s classic: In the Age of the Smart Machine (1989). While deskilling, downsizing, automating, and “info-mating” were central to this earlier literature, these themes figure less prominently in more (read more...)

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Twitter Hashtags, Emotion and The Resonance of Social Protest

Veronica Barassi June 25, 2013

There is something strikingly similar between the events taking place in Turkey and in Brazil. It is the momentum, intensity and force of these uprisings. It is the connection between profoundly context specific roots of social unrest and broader global political issues. In this post I want to focus on the issue of social media technologies. This is not to propose yet again a techno-deterministic analysis on social media and social protest. In fact, as argued elsewhere, in the understanding of the relationship between Web 2.0 technologies and social movements it is of fundamental importance that we move beyond techno-deterministic analyses that emphasize pervasiveness, agency and change (Barassi, 2012, Barassi and Treré, 2012, Barassi, 2013). What I want to do in this post is to consider the events in Turkey and Brazil by raising some points on the connection between social media, collective emotion and transnational resonance. In order to (read more...)

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A 3-D Future: A Response to Chris Anderson’s “Makers”

Andrew Schrock May 7, 2013

3-d printers have garnered much public attention lately. You may have heard about how you can print out a plastic gun, or saw the Gigabot large-format 3-d printer on Kickstarter. Or perhaps you heard Obama mention them in his 2013 state of the union address as having “the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything.” But where did they come from? On a macro level, why do they matter? One answer comes from Makers: the New Industrial Revolution, where outgoing WIRED editor Chris Anderson sees 3-d printers as driving a wave of small-scale manufacturing. Recent advances have dropped the price of additive printing systems, which delicately squeeze out plastic that hardens to make nearly any shape, to the $500-1000 range. Anderson takes Negroponte’s famous statement of working with “bits not atoms” and turns it on its head: bits can now lead to change in atoms. He sees this as the natural application of his “long tail” thesis to (read more...)

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EPIC Conference CFP [Abstracts Due March 19]

Patricia G. Lange March 11, 2013

Come venture beyond the academy to the place ‘where science lives’! Join us for the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) at the Royal Institution in London from September 15-18, 2013. Better yet, submit your work! The call for papers is below. Note the March 19 deadlines for paper abstract and Pecha Kucha submissions. EPIC is an international conference attended by anthropologists, designers, computer scientists, sociologists, business strategists, and others working in and through businesses and organizations. It aims to illuminate social phenomena through theory and practice of the contemporary digital era to transform industry and the world. Proceedings are published and can be found through AnthroSource or on Wiley Blackwell. The objects and subjects of science, technology and cultures of expertise, as well as their production and consumption, figure prominently in explorations engaged at EPIC. All the more expected this year, as the 3-day, richly interactive conference will be (read more...)

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Big Data Panel at 4S Conference [CFP]

Patricia G. Lange February 25, 2013

We are looking for people who are interested in presenting a paper at this year’s 4S Annual Meeting (October 9-12, 2013, San Diego, California) in a session we are organising on Big Data: Symbols, Practices, and Epistemic Uncertainties (see details below). Session Proposal Title: Big Data: Symbols, Practices, and Epistemic Uncertainties Convenors: Chiara Garattini (Health Strategy & Solutions, Intel Corporation) and Dawn Nafus (Intel Labs, Intel Corporation). Abstract: In the last couple of years “Big Data” has attracted increasing attention in academic, industrial and popular discourse. But what is being exactly referred to as Big Data and what are its implications? In images of data as a “gold mine” or “the new oil,” or even in Manovich’s (2012) notion of big data as a collapse of substance and surface, the sheer size and heterogeneity of these data bring back the analogue into the digital world in both the imagination and (read more...)

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CFP AAA: EMERGENT TECHNOLOGIES, FUTURE PUBLICS [Abstracts due February 22]

Jennifer Jo Thompson February 7, 2013

EMERGENT TECHNOLOGIES, FUTURE PUBLICS In keeping with the 2013 AAA meeting theme of ‘Future Publics, Current Engagements,’ this double panel brings junior and senior scholars into dialogue in order to explore how current engagements with (bio)technologies shape attitudes, behaviors, and subjectivities, and thus affect—or have the potential to affect—future publics and future bodies in meaningful ways. This panel, which we intend to submit for Invited status, is being co-organized by the Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) special interest group of the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA) and the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing (CASTAC). A number of senior scholars have agreed to contribute papers and serve as discussants on this panel. We are currently soliciting abstracts for 3-4 ‘open’ slots on the panel. While we encourage potential participants to think broadly – and critically – about this topic, preference will be given to abstracts that complement (read more...)

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Call for Papers: “Big Data, Big Questions, or, Accounting for Big Data” [Abstracts DUE October 1, 2012]

Patricia G. Lange January 22, 2013

From Kate Crawford and Mary Gray at Microsoft Research, a call for papers on Big Data: “Big Data, Big Questions, or, Accounting for Big Data” International Journal of Communication Guest Editors: Kate Crawford Microsoft Research University of New South Wales Mary L. Gray Microsoft Research Indiana University Editor: Larry Gross University of Southern California Previously isolated data sets, from social media and demographic surveys to city maps and urban planning documents, are now routinely interlinked. Combining separate, often disparate, multi-terabyte sets of information reframes our capacity to see into the behaviors of – and relationships between – people, institutions and things. Researchers in fields as varied as computer science, geography, sociology, marketing, biology, economics, among many others, use the term “big data” to capture a wide range of activities revolving around accessing and analyzing these vast quantities of information. What are the implications of big data as a cultural, technological (read more...)

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