Undercover boss is a reality TV show designed for and by people who take capitalism for granted and who are reflecting on crises that are part and parcel of what it means to live under a capitalist system. Undercover boss was first launched on Channel 4 in the UK in 2009, and country‐specific spin‐offs have since appeared in 16 other cou…[Read more]

Calling the Irrational Unmanageable Neoliberal Self

Every Click You Make, I’ll Be Watching You: Facebook Stalking and Neoliberal Information

In every US city or college campus, it is possible to attend workshops designed to teach job seekers how to fashion the genre repertoire required to apply for a job. Over the past 15 years, these workshops are arenas for hailing the neoliberal subject, teaching different genres as forms that interpellate job applicants as authors of their own ever…[Read more]

Comparing different versions of Undercover Boss reveals how an assemblage of TV producers, camera crews, businesses, and broadcasters choose to portray corporate hierarchies during the financial crisis of 2008 when corporations seemed like especially vulnerable forms of social organization for workers to rely upon. This article approaches the same…[Read more]

Many cultural anthropologists today share a common theoretical commitment: to view the people they encounter during fieldwork as living among multiple social orders that are interconnected and contingent. When social orders are multiple, ethnographers are quickly faced with the question of how people construct the boundaries between these social…[Read more]

How would the anthropology of the 1990’s have been different if anthropologists understood what it meant to be a writing subject describing Others the way that Bakhtin did? These questions are undercurrents in this essay, as I summarize what early Bakhtin has to offer contemporary anthropology so that you, gentle reader, might make a more i…[Read more]

This article suggests that one of the understudied and substantive ways in which actors produce and transform social hierarchies and classifications is by aligning and misaligning genres. Alignments within and across genres have furnished methods for construing and evaluating qualities of people – as examples, the genre repertoires of job a…[Read more]

To understand how people navigate shifting media ecologies, linguistic anthropologists have turned to an array of analytical concepts that address how people communicate when using multiple channels: media ideologies, remediation, participant structures, heteroglossia, and entextualization. After demonstrating how these concepts are pertinent to…[Read more]

Online work distribution platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk or Uber alter how work tasks are chosen or assigned. Put succinctly, instead of the employer choosing the employee, the worker chooses the task. Responses to these new technological possibilities for distributing tasks are all deeply influenced by the contemporary historical moment,…[Read more]

Many of the tasks involved in looking for a job these days involve sharing and storing
digital data. Digital technology is now required for job seekers to research employers,
store resumes, complete applications, and schedule interviews. What is the employment
process for people who are living on the poverty line, without reliable access to…[Read more]

The special issue brings together anthropologists working at the intersection of language and economy to draw attention to the dynamics of how people’s experiences of social change are articulated through genre work in different institutional contexts. In recent years, many scholars working in cultural economy have turned to language as an a…[Read more]

In this paper, the author introduces and explores the concept of synesthetic language, a multisensory linguistic system that integrates various sensory experiences into fundamental units called “synesthemes.” The author argues that synesthetic language forms the foundation of our internal thought processes, while communication with others involves…[Read more]

Lu, Toh-Ming (2023). Sarawak: my homeland. In: “Global Humanities and Liberal Arts”, Wang, Lawrence K. (Editor). Volume 2023, Number 7, 2023(7), July 25, 2023, 19 pages. Lenox Institute Press, Massachusetts, USA. Lenox.Institute@gmail.com; lut@rpi.edu; https://doi.org/10.17613/cxt3-xm50 ; ……. ABSTRACT: This electronic…[Read more]

This paper presented at the Fourth International Conference and Industrial Exhibitoion on Dairy Science Park IV, Nov 1-5, 2017, Konya, Turkey, has reviewed the philosophy of Mevlana Jalal ud Din Rumi regarding love, tolerance, respect and spiritualism; appreciating each others and knowing the value of each other. Rumi (1230) told Iqbal (1930)…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue that the temporal figure of latency is central for an understanding of the material temporalities of media. Latency as a tempo- ral figure is built into the material functioning of sound reproduction and audiovisual media. The discussion shows how latency underpins techni- cal processes of storing and reproducing sounds and…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article… One of the most striking things about speculative literature of the twenty-first century has been its increasingly focussed interest in imagining impending disaster: from the escalating likelihood of biblical deluge on a planetary scale to looming ecocatastrophes of drought and…[Read more]

This article explores an emerging cluster of ecocatastrophe narratives that locate utopian possibility within the Earth’s sub-crustal lithosphere. Texts such as N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” trilogy (2015–2017), J. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966), Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), Irene Solà’s Catalan novel When I Sing, Mountains…[Read more]

Forest conservation is a very important concept across the world. It is not only crucial for climate change but also very critical for the survival of humanity. In Africa, forests have always been an important aspect of nature that is regarded with uttermost reverence and
care. Importantly, discussions on health, healthcare, culture, economics…[Read more]