In 2023, a new museum opened in Tbilisi, at the Writer’s House of Georgia that previously house the Soviet Writers’ Union: The Museum of Repressed Writers. The museum honours the executed poets from Georgia’s Soviet past, poets whose identities Soviet authorities tried to destroy. This article examines the story the museum tells about Soviet l…[Read more]

Lawrence K. Wang, Nazih K. Shammas, William A. Selke, and Donald B. Aulenbach (2010). Flotation Technology, Humana Press, Springer Nature, USA. 680 pages. doi = 10.1007/978-1-60327-133-2; ISBN : 978-1-58829-494-4 ……. ABSTRACT: This flotation technology book has four special features: (a) Detailed coverage of the principles of air…[Read more]

Lawrence K. Wang, Nazih K. Shammas, William A. Selke, and Donald B. Aulenbach (2010). Flotation Technology, Humana Press, Springer Nature, USA. 680 pages. doi = 10.1007/978-1-60327-133-2; ISBN : 978-1-58829-494-4 ……. ABSTRACT: This flotation technology book has four special features: (a) Detailed coverage of the principles of air…[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]

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]

The term ‘affective politics’ is sometimes used to dismiss political strategies as being directed merely at affects at the expense of rational analysis (Massumi 2015: 65f). While such uses are meant to criticize certain politics, appeals to the affects – and consequently, forms of propaganda or populism – do not have to be bad at all. The point h…[Read more]

Tsao, Hung-ping (2023). 500 Natural Sudoku Puzzles. In: “Evolutionary Progress in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM)”, Wang, Lawrence K. and Tsao, Hung-ping (editors). Volume 5, NUMBER 9B, September 2023; 477 pages. Lenox Institute Press, Auburndale, MA, 02466, USA. No. STEAM-VOL5-NUM9B-SEP2023; …….. ABSTRACT:…[Read more]