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

In 2023 we will be looking at the theme of ‘Exploring Climate Solutions’. We will develop an understanding of environmental issues such as green energy, food systems, reforestation and soil regeneration. To date, this course has been focused on work that diagnoses environmental problems, such as the extinction crises, long-term pollutants and…[Read more]

Call for Participation.
The Faculty of Arts, University of Calabar, Calabar Nigeria in conjunction with African Electronic Literature Alliance & African Diasporic Electronic Alliance (AELA&ADELI) organises The 3rd African Electronic Literature Alliance International Workshop Conference (AELAIWC2023)

Theme: Digital Humanities &…[Read more]

Kongruenz, Sorge und Technologie. Tricks des Verschwindens: Dienstleistung als eine Kulturtechnik des Delegierens. #Syllabi und Schattenbibliotheken: Mittel der kollektiven Gestaltung. Eine durch das Wissen um ihre Werkzeuge und Quellen definierte Gemeinschaft werden.

In this provocation, I investigate the notion of long term thinking, as a notion of ‘sustaining time’, which identifies failures in dominant conceptions of time and proposes an alternative that is thought to be better suited for responding to current environmental crises. Drawing on close analyses of two examples, I argue for a deeper und…[Read more]

The role of the internet in fomenting male supremacist ideology must be understood within the larger cultural context that undergirds and naturalizes such rhetoric. Traditional conservative (TradCon) sections of the manosphere valorize a patriarchal social order centering traditional gender roles. According to TradCon reasoning, men, under attack…[Read more]

The early modern use of vegetal terms to explain the origin and growth of ores was widespread in mining industry, alchemy, and natural philosophy. In the writings of authors from many different backgrounds, mineral veins were often described as ‘trees’ which moved upwards, bore fruits, and underwent a life cycle. Accordingly, the existence in ore…[Read more]

The evils that some researchers attribute to the “Anthropocene” are not the responsibility of all humanity; the main culprits, who have the political and economic power to shape the forms of production and consumption and define lifestyles, must be distinguished from the majority of the population, whose power to change things cannot be com…[Read more]

The RENEW project has its foundations in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration, that is, research reaching across disciplines and beyond academia. This document aims to facilitate consideration of, and guide, collaborative practices within and around RENEW. It will act as a ‘living’ resource for RENEW members and partners to use…[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

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]

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]