I lay out what I believe ethnographers of AI who engage with large language models (LLMs) might want to pay attention to in the next couple of years.
My starting point is that it would be helpful to explore how people are responding to ChatGPT in terms of genre, that people’s reactions to ChatGPT is to treat it at its core as though it is a g…[Read more]

This paper was presented at “Encounters with the Uncanny in Education” seminar organized by Antti Saari, Jan Varpanen, and Johanna Kallio at University of Tampere. The seminar was part of their EnAct – Researching Environmental Activism and Self-Cultivation research project.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of PoLAR‘s publication of Ilana Gershon’s “Critical Review Essay: Studying Cultural Pluralism in Courts versus Legislatures.” This essay serves as a foundation for this conversation about anthropology’s interventions into legislative studies more broadly. Gershon’s argument that anything and anyone can…[Read more]

Just how bleak is the academic job market for anthropologists? Job ads over the past twenty years reveal some surprises and point to ways departments are seeking to change themselves and the discipline

Zoom is the least of our problems

Trump Gives Fascism a Bad Name

Pyramid Scheme. #hautalk

Forget the tut-tutting of politicians: The skills you learn in the humanities are exactly the skills you use in a job search.

The quitting economy

“A Friend of a Friend” Is No Longer the Best Way to Find a Job

Job Search 101: Debunking 5 Popular Myths that No Longer Apply

Don’t Post So Close To Me

In der Einleitung zum Sammelband Auditive Wissenskulturen – Das Wissen klanglicher Praxis stellen die Autoren zuerst die Diskrepanzen der jeweiligen Beziehungen des Visuellen und des Auditiven zu Wissen anhand einiger Beispiele vor. Sie exemplifzieren auch, wie sowohl auditive Praxis als auch die Hervorbringung und Vermittlung von Wissen in s…[Read more]

In this homage to David Graeber, I turn to Americans’ experiences working in person during the pandemic as an ethnographic lens for understanding how workers respond when implicit social contracts are violated and when ideas about the common good are being contested. Because the United States federal government and many state governments refused t…[Read more]

Digital Economy and Labor

Planning Your Research

In the early decades of the internet, many saw new channels of communication as potentially beneficial disruptions, analyzing largely through a utopic lens, albeit often with a technolibertarian bent. This did not last, and by the 2020s, scholars were increasingly pessimistic about how neoliberal logics structured the ways these technologies…[Read more]

Every fall, some lucky anthropology departments get to hire. The search for a new colleague happens behind the scenes for a while before it goes public—five-year plans have been written, external reviews have been navigated, lots of conversations have occurred, and some pleading with a dean has taken place. But the first public hint that the d…[Read more]

Many job applicants spend an inordinate amount of time struggling with the task of fashioning the most appealing biography of the increasingly skillful self out of interwoven genres that can also circulate individually. These struggles are most frequently articulated as questions of how best to manage different genres’ chronotopic expectations. U…[Read more]