Tag: anthropology

Teaching the Anthropology of Outer Space

I think I’ve been most surprised by how effectively exploring anthropology in the context of space has educated me on anthropology in general. Having never taken a prior anthropology class, I think learning about it (and consequently, us) through a specific topic, such as space anthropology, has been a great way to learn. This is the kind of student endorsement that makes a professor’s heart sing. A few weeks ago, I asked students in my “Anthropology of Outer Space” class to provide me with some feedback on what “surprised” them most about this class. I did this to confirm a hunch that as much as the students were excited about outer space, they were becoming equally excited about anthropology. Sure enough, a third of the anthropology of outer space class said that what surprised them most was their interest in and the relevance of anthropology both for understanding human culture in general and science in specific. The class, I should note, is being taught at the University of Virginia, and cross-listed between the School of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences. With two exceptions, the students are majoring in STEM fields. For many of the engineering students, this is their first humanities/social science class in college; for most every other student, their first anthropology class. (read more...)

Announcing the 2015 CASTAC Junior-Senior Mentor Program at AAA!

Now Recruiting for CASTAC Junior-Senior Mentor Program at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the AAA CASTAC, the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing, seeks to support the professional development of scholars in the anthropology of science and technology. To this end, we are pleased to announce our second Junior-Senior Mentor Program for the 2015 AAA Annual Meeting in Denver. We invite faculty and researchers at all levels and career trajectories to participate in our mentorship program. CASTAC will match mentors and mentees according to overlapping research interests and facilitate their initial contact. Participants will then arrange a time to meet during the conference.  Meetings may last about an hour, potentially touching upon a range of topics such as funding, professionalization, job preparation, and new directions in STS and anthropology. As CASTAC members can attest from participating in this and similar programs at other conferences, mentorship is an (read more...)

Auxiliary Motives and the Anthropology of Technology

If you are lost in the middle of the woods, you have a problem. Assuming that you’ve ended up in this predicament without any navigational aids or food, you’ll have to start walking. Any direction is better than none: if you stay put, you’ll starve. And, once you pick a direction, you better keep going: if you keep changing your mind, you’ll just go in circles, and you’ll also starve. Your problem, aside from the lack of food and abundance of predators, is in deciding which way to go: if all your options look the same, how are you supposed to decide? (read more...)

Digital Ethnography

At the end of 2012 Larissa Hjorth, Jo Tacchi and I published a special issue of Media International Australia on ‘rethinking’ ethnography and ethnographic practice (see TOC below). Through six single and co-authored contributions, the special issue considers the variety of ways in which the changes in our media environment broadens what we think of as ‘media’, the contexts through which media is produced, used and circulated and the emergent practices that digital media affords. We begin this inquiry by considering how the changing media environment has introduced new scholars and debates around the value and practice of ethnography. We then turn more specifically to the ways in which media ethnography is being practiced in light of the new contexts of research, be they the broadcasters trying to keep pace with the changes of the changing media environment or researchers working through what to do with the fieldsite and myriad of (read more...)