This article argues that there exists a problematic nexus between the industrial livestock industry, US food system policies, and American propagandist literature. The essay’s specific aim is to transform carnivorous appetites by subverting the integrity of America’s national gastronomic emblem – the hamburger. The article examines how hambu…[Read more]

A STEAM-informed humanities’ essay describing the theoretical concept of “ecophobia”-a notion put forward in Simon Estok’s theoretical text The Ecophobia Hypothesis (Routledge 2018) that describes the systemic human fear of nature.

The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways
in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence
ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also
reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article
traces the…[Read more]

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature? I claim that conceptually linking the Constitutional protections enabled by the American civil rights movement to an emerging civil rights of nature would enable the rapid transition away from ecophobic attitudes toward…[Read more]

The Covid-19 pandemic, though less prominent in the headlines than in 2020 and 2021, is still with us today and has become part of our cultural memory. This essay looks at the loftily titled Decameron Project (2020), an international volume of what may be called ‘lockdown fiction’, commissioned by The New York Times Magazine. Special attention is…[Read more]

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]

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

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