All Tomorrow's Cultures

      A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: sentiment analyses of new connections and communities in a COVID world.     Quarantine re-makes the city around us, re-defining “inside” and “outside,” “home” and “neighborhood.”   “Staying home” means complying with a socially and politically constructed bubble that delimits not only who or what can move from one side or another, but the protocols to be followed when that barrier is breached.   Moreover, transitioning from one to another is not just a matter of spatial movement, it also involves a shift in identity, from the one quarantined to the one not quarantined.   Finally, quarantine is a temporal state: fourteen days, or until the city lifts the quarantine measures.   Under these conditions, what does “home” mean?   What does “inside” mean?   And when one is quarantined, what do more collective identities like “community” and “neighborhood” mean?   U...

 Just published, and not behind a paywall.  You can find it here , in the Spring 2020 issue of Anthropological Quarterly.  Update - now it is!  Uggh - what the hell did I expect. 

From Wikimedia Commons   As I complete this essay, the quarantine imposed on Baltimore stretches into its second month, and I continue teaching online amid terror and despair.   Blog posts and newspaper articles forecast a new era of education in the age of social distancing, a new kind of virtual conference in the absence of travel, and new research without the face-to-face interactions that have heretofore been the bread-and-butter of ethnographic fieldwork.  All of these may be prognostications, but they are not, I would submit, really about the future.  Instead, each “future” describes a present--online education, virtual meetings, digital anthropology.  None of them are really “new” at all.  Just the opposite, they are part of a process of what Escobar (echoing Tony Fry) describes as “the systematic destruction of possible futures by the structured unsustainability of modernity” (Escobar 2018: 117).  H...

(from our storymap ) In my capacity as a fellow in our faculty research center, I've been doing a lot of support work for the unexpected shift to learning-at-a-distance.  At my uni, very few of us have experience teaching online.  The faculty (generally) aren't especially enthusiastic, and there hasn't really been a lot of institutional support.  So, I wasn't surprised when most of the questions I was fielding took the form of: "I do X in my class.  How can I do X online?"  Not surprised because that's the ideological frame distance education has relied upon: an exact homology between offline- and online teaching, with the physical classroom replaced by the discussion board, the lectures by videos.  But actual online courses (not our band aid efforts to stitch together something in a few days) are structured very differently than their physical counterparts.  The best classes maximize their digital affordances and don’t try to simply "reprodu...

From the conclusion to my contribution on " Social Media " in Wiley's "The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology:" Anthropologists are still coming to terms with social media and its impact on every level of our lives.  No matter what new SNS platforms develop, though, it is certain that social media will continue to be a source of controversy in the field. The reasons for controversy may vary, but they will all pivot on the essential liminality of social media. By definition, it occupies spaces between worlds: between people, between online and offline, between official and unofficial, between private and public, between resistance and accommodation, between horizontality and verticality. For all of these reasons, anthropologists are unlikely to be entirely comfortable with the social media they and their interlocutors utilize, whatever new platforms may develop in the future. But that discomfort can also be a source of strength, one that can help to h...

My review of the tremendously exciting collection of translated South Korean science fiction: Readymade Bodhisattva .  It's the first of its kind in English, and serves as a tremendous introduction to SF that is really quite different than that of neighboring China or Japan. 

The American Anthropological Association/ Canadian Anthropological Society meeting in Vancouver is in November, but the browsable schedule is already out.  As in previous years, I have identified future-oriented or science fiction-oriented panels that I would love to attend (including two I'm on). This may not be a complete list, and I apologize for panels I've missed.  But even this, incomplete as it might be, is an impressive collection of a robust future-orientation in the work of anthropologists.  Thursday, November 21 8:00 AM – 9:45 AM   –   Decolonial Belongings and Futures: Creating Spaces of Belonging thru Epistemic Disobedience - Vancouver CC EAST, Room 7 2:00 PM – 3:45 PM   –   Biofutures - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 122 2:00 PM – 3:45 PM   –   Haunting Toward the Future: Colonial Durabilities and Temporalities - Vancouver CC EAST, Room 13 2:00 PM – 3...