What if performance is no longer the dominant trope for understanding the mediated self? What if animation is as or more important as a trope? This essay explores what questions scholars would ask if they were to begin with animation as the starting point.

This article discusses personal branding, a performance genre that many job seekers in the United States are told to master in order to get a job. I discuss the specific techniques you are supposed to use to brand yourself, some of the origins of these techniques, and the reasons why people find it challenging to put these techniques into…[Read more]

Keepin’ It Real: Facebook’s Honesty Box and Ethnic Verbal Genres

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]

With the climate of Brexit, xenophobia and white supremacy on the rise, health and safety of Black and Global Majority people under threat during the spread of Covid in the UK and elsewhere, a discussion of colonialism, migration, borders, and equality – in the classrooms and outside – is more pertinent than ever. Situating the ongoing Dec…[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]

Since 2016, the academic narrative emerging from the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities in Eatonville, Florida, has increasingly relied on a public scholarship model to bridge the gap between institutional practice and community knowledge. Inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s legacy as an interdisciplinary scholar, these a…[Read more]

This paper aims to examine models by which symbolism of light and lamp in
the Mediterranean region was manifested in the early Christian visual culture,
i.e. lamp representations from Central Balkans. Lamps with Early
Christian representations are considered in the context of transculturality
of Late Antiquity, as well as political and…[Read more]