Highly Accurate Pictures of Anthropologists

Here's something fun for back to class: the relatively new tumblr Highly Accurate Pictures of Anthropologists!

Alex Golub posted about his new project on anthro{dendum} back in November, but it is totally worth a re-post here. Golub notes the impetus for this new tumblr as "driven by [his] long-term interest in curating open access material. The Internet is awash in high-quality material. But it’s also awash in… well, let’s just say that sometimes the signal to noise ration on the Internet is not where I’d want it to be. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to pictures of anthropologists."

Not only a fun/ useful collection to review, but the tumblr account also has lots of great links to the online sources for these photos (#FurtherReading). Golub is also taking requests if there's an anthropologist out there whose highly accurate and well-sourced picture you need.

Happy 2018!

A look back at anthropology everywhere in 2017!

As 2017 comes rapidly to a close, here's our annual round-up of some of our favourite posts and content published this year.

Thanks to everyone who has read our over 90 new posts, and checked out our growing list of dedicated pages on things like Advice for Grad Students, our expanding list of links to how people are Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university, and our newly renamed Special Series: Ethnography & ... which now features reflections and insights from blogger Jennifer Long's new pedagogical research in post-secondary education.

Looking back, here are 10 of our own favourite posts from 2017 loosely organized around some key themes...

On ethnography and fieldwork:

• Teaching ethnography (26 January 2017)
• Fieldwork: preparing for the good, bad, and the ugly (16 March 2017)
• Promoting publications behind paywalls... or anthro everywhere! in Anthropologica (15 May 2017)

Engaging anthropology through social media:

• Blogging for research (9 January 2017)
• Why We Post: Anthropologists take on Social Media (26 June 2017)
• Anthropology Podcasting (24 August 2017)
• Fake News: Questions and Resources for Back to Class and All Year Round (7 September 2017)

And to round it out, some of our favourite topical posts from 2017:

• Special Friday Edition: The Dutch Election, Domino Effects and Wilders' Patriotic Spring (17 March 2017)
• What's in a Word? The Importance of Recognizing the Etymology of Words (27 March 2017)
• #Canada150, Indigenous nations 13,000... (3 July 2017)

Thanks for reading this year! We'll be back in 2018 with more resources, more research, and more anthropology everywhere!

What were your favourite posts from 2017? Tweet us @anthrolens

Got ideas for posts you'd like to see (or see more of) in 2018? Send us an email anthrolens@gmail.com

Race Reconciled - Review by Jason Antrosio

Bloggers Rhiannon Mosher and Jennifer Long wanted to point readers to an important blog post on Living Anthropologically called “Race is not an accurate or productive way to describe human biological variation” by Jason Antrosio.

In this article, Antrosio discusses a special issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and, deep in the post, the (mis) use of research in popular media and academic research articles. Antrosio writes:

As I searched relevant articles, I was shocked and disgusted to discover the materials from forensic anthropologists were not only suffering popular misinterpretation, but were also being misused in peer-reviewed academic journals. One of the only 2010 articles citing the forensic anthropology pieces from Race Reconciled is a diatribe by philosopher Neven Sesardic titled Race: A social destruction of a biological concept. Sesardic claims fuzzy-headed social scientists and philosophers have misunderstood the proper biological underpinnings of the race concept. Sesardic then uses the forensic anthropology articles to make his case. Sesardic calls Sauer a “bewildered and exasperated scientist” (2010:156) and goes on to approvingly quote Sauer’s 1992 article as supporting the idea of racial assignment. He similarly cherry-picks quotes from the 2009 articles to portray forensic anthropology as confirming traditional biological races.

What better way to end off the semester than to have students read this post and discuss how scientific research is interpreted in the media. Happy end of semester everyone!

Antrosio has updated both posts recently and they're definitely worth a read.

Quick Links

• Antrosio, Jason, 2011. “Race Reconciled: Race isn’t skin color, biology, or genetics.” Living Anthropologically website, https://www.livinganthropologically.com/biological-anthropology/race-reconciled-debunks-race/. First posted 5 June 2011. Last updated 26 October 2017.

Preventing Academic Dishonesty...

On the heels of our experiences in the Grading Inferno, we are reminded of this very interesting article from UA about The importance of ethics education from October.

Author Emily Bell discusses teaching courses on ethics, and the broader life lessons that she's learned (and hopes her students have learned) from this experience. What is interesting to consider here is how the breaches in academic honesty and ethics in our university classrooms (I didn't mean to/ knwo I was plagiarizing, for instance) spring from the same sources unethical behaviour that occurs beyond academia.

In addition to Obedience to authority and Conformity bias, Bell notes the following factors that play into when and how people choose to act unethically:

• Rationalization and bias: We believe that we are more ethical than we actually are, and create rationalizations to explain any unethical behaviours. We believe that we are good people and this leads us to make ethical decisions rapidly.
• Time pressure: Unethical behaviours are more likely when we act under a time pressure.
• Fatigue: Unethical behaviours are more likely when we are fatigued.
• Lack of transparency: Unethical behaviours are more likely when we know that no one is watching.

We can see how and when students might test or breach the boundaries of ethical behaviour given these dimensions of our classrooms. For instance, time-pressure and fatigue are near constants during semester crunch-times.

Luckily, Bell also suggests how instructors might consider bringing a discussion of these factors into our teaching, by making room for students to reflect on ethical dilemmas and choices for action. These include a focus on learning objectives, critical reflection on ethically complex case-studies, making space and time for discussion, and encouraging "students to think about how these factors may be present in different contexts (for instance, in business, sports, or in different work environments)."

Check out Bell's article and related resources in the quick links and links to further reading on similar topics below:

• The importance of ethics education (October 2017, University Affairs)
• From anthro everywhere!
• Did I plagiarize? A flow chart (6 November 2017)
• Anthropological Ethics Outside Anthropology Classrooms (12 June 2017)
• Bullshit! Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data Syllabus (23 March 2017)

Did I plagiarize? A flow chart

For teachers and students alike, early November is the heart of the mid-term assignment swamp. As we wade through various assignments, questions of how to maintain academic integrity in one's work are bound to arise.

Well, since I am also in the middle of that swamp, here's a quick, kind of fun infographic to share from The Visual Communication Guy's blog:

Did I Plagiarize? Infographic Flow Chart from The Visual Communication Guy

Click on the photo's caption to follow the link to the original post (and zoom-able graphic).

Good luck getting through the mid-term marking! See you on the other side...

Syllabi resources for challenging systemic racism, colonization, and more

In the wake of the horrific, racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia this past weekend, it is important for anthropologists to think about our voice in university classrooms as a way of speaking to wide-ranging systemic inequalities in our lives, and the lives of our students. For many of us, challenging these systems of oppression by understanding the social processes and forms that underlie them is part and parcel of what contemporary anthropology offers as a holistic, empirically-grounded, critical way of seeing the world.

With this in mind, we want to remind instructors of some of the inspiring resources that anthropologists, other scholars, and social justice activists have created to help educators bring contemporary issues into our classrooms collected on anthro everywhere!'s Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources.

In addition to resources already documented here (e.g. Anthropoliteia's #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus project, Ethnographic approaches to understanding Trump/Brexit/new rise of conservativism, Decolonizing Anthropology, or the Islamophobia is Racism Syllabus) We've also recently updated the page with the Anthropoliteia's list of course syllabi on Policing and the timely Charlottesville Syllabus:

a resource created by the Graduate Student Coalition for Liberation to be used to educate readers about the long history of white supremacy in Charlottesville, Virginia. With resources selected and summaries written by UVa graduate students, this abridged version of the Syllabus is organized into six sections that offer contemporary and archival primary and secondary sources (articles, books, responses, a documentary, databases) and a list of important terms for discussing white supremacy. Only “additional resources” are not available online (but can be found either through JSTOR, at the library, or for purchase).

We have also added a few great resources from Somatosphere on teaching medical anthropology and illness that might be of interest to instructors for this upcoming academic year.

• Resources for teaching medical anthropology (21 August  2012)
• Syllabi on culture and mental health (28 August 2013)
• Illness and subjectivity: a syllabus (6 November 2013)

The Connection between Anthropology and Jedi Training

Gillian Parrish wrote a post for Magna's Faculty Focus magazine entitled Jedi Training: Developing Habits of Perception in Our Disciplines.

In this piece, Parrish describes how longstanding practitioners develop implicit skills that can be the source of some of the deepest learning for our students. Parrish argues that faculty must try and develop empathy in their students so that their knowledge learned can blossom into expertise and wisdom.

To do this, Parrish advocates that faculty 1) identify the habitual, underlying modes of sensing in our disciplines, and 2) design assignments for practicing these modes in whole-person ways that engage our students not only intellectually, but in their embodied, emotional everyday lives.

Parrish mentions activities that she uses to achieve these goals including developing students' listening and orientation skills by having them slip into an "ethnographic mode" for an activity (writing what they describe as 'the heart of the conversation complete with pauses and description). Parrish goes on to describe other approaches that would feel quite at home in an anthropologist's classroom; for example, when Parrish advocates that students need to acknowledge how they see the world around them, engage in self reflection, and notice (their) implicit habits of perceiving everyday life as a practitioner in your field.

So why the connection to Jedi Training? Parrish states:

Jedi-training exercises require the kind of close attention and new ways of thinking that can lead to love for our subject matter. This kind of whole-person learning guards against abstraction, keeps us in relationship with the wider world, makes us better caretakers of people and planet. For after all, as observed by my four-year-old niece: “We are all connected. In a web. Like the Force.”

Read more of Parrish's post through the Quick Links below.

Quick Links: 

• Jedi Training: Developing Habits of Perception in Our Disciplines by Gillian Parrish (August 7, 2017)

Perspectives: checking out the new #OpenAccess textbook

In a recent post, Anthrodendum (formerly Savage Minds) highlights the new open-access teaching resource Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology.

This new, open-access textbook is a project supported and sponsored by the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges (SACC) and its members. As a collaborative project, each chapter is written by different authors addressing a key anthropological topic, allowing the authors to incorporate their personal experiences as anthropologists working on these questions in the field.

Chapters cover major thematic questions in sociocultural anthropology, and are supplemented with some exciting teaching resources that address current questions and concerns in the discipline, such as the role of anthropology in our everyday lives and public anthropology.

The text is available online and for chapter-by-chapter download. As an open-access textbook, the editors suggest in their Anthrodendum post that "choosing Perspectives for our classes, and eliminating the substantial cost of commercial textbooks from our syllabi, may open opportunities for us to adopt other books written by our colleagues and produced by university presses."

Check out this interesting resource and other teaching tools and tips on our Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources page.

Quick links:

• Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, edited by Nina Brown, Laura Tubelle de González, and Thomas McIlwraith
• Perspectives: An Open Access Intro Anthro Textbook (Anthrodendum)
• Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources (anthro everywhere!)

Anthropology Blogs for the Affluent Tech-Thusiast?

Scientific American identifies its 9 million strong readership as educated and affluent adults. The magazine is #1 when reaching “tech-thusiasts" who they define as individuals who own and use new technology and who are apt to buying the latest devices. Why is this important?

This digital magazine has had a long running a series (since 2011) called Anthropology in Practice: Exploring the human condition. The main contributor is Krystal D'Costa who is an anthropologist living in New York City. Much like us here at anthroeverywhere!, D'Costa's posts explore everyday life from the anthropological perspective.

The following list demonstrates the range of topics:

• A four part series on Rice & Beans (May 11 2015) - See the first post on How does culture become generic? 
• Why Does Everything Look the Same? (July 15 2015)
• Shared Sanitation: Bathroom Access and Facilities Around the World (May 11 2016)
• Understanding The Social Capital of Fake News (November 28 2017)
• A Nation Divided by Social Media (January 31 2017)
• The Rising Trend of Pets at Work (May 11 2017)

These interesting reads would be useful discussion starters for a second year anthropology classrooms or as a quick link share for friends, parents or managers who are trying to answer: well, what can anthropology do?

Quick Links: 

• Anthropology in Practice: Exploring the human condition Krystal D'Costa at Scientific American 
• Why We Post: Anthropologists take on Social Media Anthro Everywhere! (June 26 2017)
• Teaching Resource: Social Inequality and Teaching in the Academy Anthro Everywhere! (May 25 2017)
• Teaching Ethnography Anthro Everywhere! (January 25 2017)

Why We Post: Anthropologists take on Social Media

In response to our posts last week about the presence and role of anthropologists and other academics on social media, I stumbled across the Why We Post, Social Media Through the Eyes of the World website.

From Why We Post website, you can delve deeper into their 15 Discoveries about social media. You can also download their free e-book from UCL Press. These resources are evidence-based, accessible, and use a global perspective to understand social media from various perspectives.

From their publication, How The World Changed Social Media, authors Daniel Miller, Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer and Shriram Venkatraman, define social media as follows (2016, x):

Social media should not be seen primarily as the platforms upon which people post, but rather as the contents that are posted on these platforms. These contents vary considerably from region to region, which is why a comparative study is necessary. The way in which we describe social media in one place should not be understood as a general description of social media: it is rather a regional case. Social media is today a place within which we socialise, not just a means of communication.

Their approach to social media is unique as they propose the following collaborating ideas:

• Propose a theory of scalable sociality
• Engage a theory of polymedia
• Reject the notion that online spaces are separate from 'real life', and
• Propose a 'theory of attainment' to describe the new capacities of human communication.

Check out this interesting resource (project started in 2016) in the light of anthro everywhere!'s discussion on social media last week or, as a resource to begin discussions of social media, communication, and global context in the classroom.

Quick Links:

• Anthro Everywhere! Academics and their Social Media Presence (22 June 2017)
• Anthro Everywhere! The Relationship between Social Justice & Anthropology (19 June 2017)
• Anthro Everywhere! Students as Public Intellectuals - Another Push toward Altmetrics? (22 September 2016)
• Why We Post, Social Media Through the Eyes of the World, 15 Discoveries (2016)
• How The World Changed Social Media (2016)

An Anthropologist In Situ: Canadian Engineering Education Association 2017 Conference

As mentioned in our previous blog post, I recently spoke about the potential of bringing anthropological ethics into Engineering classrooms (as per my current teaching role).

I was accepted to speak at the CEEA conference which had Innovation and Diversity in Engineering Education as its theme.

As part of a special symposium on diversity, I wrote a paper on the role of team work workshops in developing a tolerance for diversity and self-reflection.

Below is the paper abstract:

In their quest to find work-ready graduates, employers are increasingly prioritizing graduates with so-called transferable skills. These transferable skills include critical thinking and problem-solving skills, communication skills, and the ability to work in diverse teams. With the plethora of engineering education literature on the topic of developing undergraduates’ teamwork abilities, there are numerous suggestions and little consensus on the best way to develop these skills in engineering classrooms. This paper adds to this literature and provides an overview of group work workshops for first-year undergraduates. The hope for these workshops was to better equip students for future group work activities by providing them easy-to-remember teamwork tools that were first learned and practiced in low-stakes workshop environments. Following their participation in these workshops, students participated in focus groups and feedback demonstrated an appreciation for these workshops as well as the opportunity to self-reflect on their role as a team member. Further, there appeared to be a shift in the awareness and tolerance of the diversity found among group members, which demonstrates a potential area for further investigation. The authors conclude with a call for more research in order to better understand the role of teamwork as a means for developing tolerance toward diversity among first-year undergraduate students. 

Important to Monday's post, these workshops incorporated:

• The importance of using a holistic perspective to understand how all the parts of Engineering students' come and work together. 
• Self-reflection to understand the power and privilege of their role and how that role is perceived with the community.

Quick links and further reading:

• Anthropological Ethics outside of Anthropological Classrooms (June 08, 2017, anthro everywhere!)

Anthropological Ethics Outside Anthropology Classrooms

In line with Monday's post on alt-ac careers for anthropologists, I wanted to further explore the role of Anthropology (its knowledge, methods, approach, etc.) outside its home discipline. If you follow the blog, you'll know that Rhiannon and I attended the most recent Annual Conference of the Canadian Anthropology Society. We got too caught up in blogging and tweeting about the release of our joint article and we were missed out writing about our presentations.

In my paper, I reflected on the ways in which the anthropological lens could illuminate ideas and meanings between different academic disciplines and broader publics. To do this, I asked, how does my current program (McMaster's Bachelor of Technology Program) prepare its students to work with community members (as supposedly work-ready graduates in the Faculty of Engineering)?

This struck me as an interesting topic because I believed there to be an opportunity to create a shared language around ethics and ethical conduct in classrooms of anthropology and engineering. One which focused on context and seeking representative perspectives.

I'm interested to learn how instructors, students, and professionals who advise the curriculum teach and learn about ethics in engineering classrooms.

I was not the first person to look at the application of anthropological ethics in other disciplines, let alone Engineering. Mustafa Babiker compared engineering & anthropological codes in 2011. Unfortunately, his conference presentation is no longer available online; however, here are my notes outlining his comparison:

• Babiker compared anthropological ethical codes of conduct (AAA 1998 version of the code of ethics & Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth 1999) to engineering codes (US Society of Professional Engineers and International Federation of Consulting Engineers) 
• He found that these codes originated through different motivations – for engineering it was a reaction to disasters and scandals versus anthropology – reaction to work during imperialism and issues of deception (among other things)
• Regarding avoidance of harm: (1) Engineering codes focused on avoiding harm through physical development and not data collection; (2) anthropological codes concerned with effects of knowledge collection and dissemination or data misuse
• Regarding informed consent: Informed consent was all but absent in the Engineering code. Further, lack of awareness concerning unequal impact(s) of their work against vulnerable peoples, important especially when projects call for public consultation
• Regarding confidentiality: Babiker found evidence of the differences between accountability to stakeholders; Anthropologists often prioritize (theoretically/ideally) rights of the marginalized whereas Engineers prioritize many stakeholders (clients, professional engineers, and the public good). The definition of the public good includes descriptors such as humanity’s cultural, historical and archaeological heritage; health and well being of current and future generations, environment.
• Similar to codes found on our PEO (Professional Engineers of Ontario – licencing body where I work) in which a practitioner is called to “regard the practitioner's duty to public welfare as paramount” (Code of Ethics 2013)   

Babiker wrote about the important similarities and difference between codes as an opportunity to integrate codes and practices.

In an educational setting -- where by we might prepare future engineering students for ethical challenges in the workplace -- I argued that those teaching ethics might also be interested to add the following to Babiker’s list:

• The importance of using a holistic perspective to understand how one's work may impact the greater community 
• It is important to consider as well, how some people might be uniquely and/or adversely affected due to their social location or historic inequalities and systemic exclusion (or inclusion). I suggested that engineering students do not receive training on systemic inequality couched in terms of social justice or learn how systems thinking as it applies to human experiences, more often machines.
• Self-reflection to understand the power and privilege of their role and how that role is perceived with the community.
• I asked about the potential role engineers could play in seeking out, what anthropologists see as “representative and representational voices” of a community. Asking who is not here, what voices have we not yet heard from, in public consultation
• I also thought engineers could question one’s relationship with that community, what is the legacy of engineering work beyond a professional code of conduct? This opens up questions of advocacy and answering the question: why and for whom when participating as a consultant.

I've just come back from my first Engineering Conference. I will write more about the paper I gave here, in the next post.

Quick links and further reading:

• #AltAc Anthropology Careers - The draw of experiential design firms (5 June 2017, anthro everywhere!)
• At #CASCAIUAES17 in Ottawa! (1 May 2017, anthro everywhere!)
• Promoting publications behind paywalls... or anthro everywhere! in Anthropologica (15 May 2017, anthro everywhere!)
• Bringing anthropological ethics into the classroom (24 April 2017, anthro everywhere!)
• Rage and Despair, in Reponse to Trump's Executive Order (12 May 2017)

Teaching Resource: Social Inequality and Teaching in the Academy

As anthropologists, we frequently teach about power dynamics and social inequality in our classrooms. Especially in the context of efforts to decolonize anthropology, many of us reflect on these relationships within our classrooms, within the university, in our relationships with our students, and the course content/ materials we teach.

In this vein, we offer this five-part series (2017) in which sociologist Elaine Coburn explores "Social Inequality and Teaching in the Academy." Coburn writes that "We live in an unequal world; these inequalities do not stop at the university classroom door." In this series, she considers "some ways unjust inequalities are (re)produced in the classroom" and through our relationship with our students.

Part I: Pedagogy is Not (Just) About Technique
Part II: The Problems with the Conscientious Pedagogue
Part III: The Practical Challenges of Broadening the Scholarly Canon
Part IV: As Professors, We are Not All Equal Before Our Students
Part V: “Imagine Otherwise” – Ways Forward

How might Coburn's reflections and suggestions be useful for how you plan your next class?

Additional resources:

• Paige West's Teaching Decolonizing Methodologies (Savage Minds, 2016) from their 20-part Decolonizing Anthropology series.
• Our post on Reading Lists for Decolonizing Anthropology & Beyond (15 December 2016) and our page including these resources and more: Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources

Islamophobia is Racism Syllabus

Adding to the impressive list of open access teaching resources, the Islamophobia is Racism Syllabus provides texts for "Teaching & Learning about anti-Muslim Racism in the United States."

The authors identify the following goals of their Syllabus:

1. Define anti-Muslim racism as an alternative to the concept of Islamophobia
2. Understand the relationship of race and religion to white supremacy through the racialized figure of the Muslim
3. Provide an intersectional and comparative analysis to anti-Muslim racism
4. Strategize ways to challenge anti-Muslim racism and resist white supremacy
5. The syllabus is organized by the following themes and topics, which move from broader framing issues to more specific examples. Later readings may benefit from the contextualization provided by earlier sections.  

Bringing into conversation a wide variety of interdisciplinary texts -- both scholarly and popular -- this syllabus interrogates the relationship between Islampohobia and Racism through the following sections:

I. Race, Empire and Islam
II. The Production and Reproduction of Anti-Muslim Racism
III. The Impact of Anti-Muslim Racism
IV. Policing, Security and Anti-Muslim Racism
V. Resisting Anti-Muslim Racism
VI. Further Reading and Resources

While this syllabus provides a valuable resource for teaching on these topics, what further reading suggestions would you like to add to this collection? Do you have additional ethnographic or anthropological texts you would like to propose? Or perhaps texts that interrogate this relationship in non-American contexts? If so, email (anthrolens@gmail.com) or tweet us (@anthrolens) with your suggestions and we'll add them here!

Quick links and further reading:

• Islamophobia is Racism Syllabus
• #BlackIslamSyllabus a Google Doc "curated by Dr. Kayla Renée Wheeler ....  The goal of this project is to provide teachers, professors, researchers, journalists, and people interested in learning more about Islam with resources on Black Muslims to promote a more inclusive approach to the study of Islam."
• additional Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources (anthro everywhere! page)

Bringing anthropological ethics into the classroom

With the Canadian Anthropology Society Conference next week comes CASCA's Spring issue of the network's newsletter, Culture.

One item that caught our eye in this issue was Eric Henry's description of a case-study discussion activity he created for students to work through some of the potentially thorny issues anthropologists and linguists face in the field: Targaryen Ethics: A Case Study in Linguistic Appropriation Using “Game of Thrones”

Henry writes that in his linguistic anthropology course,

language appears to students to be a relatively uncontroversial topic of research – in what possible way could listening to an oral history or eliciting verb conjugations harm someone?
I wanted to get students thinking about some of the thorny ethical issues surrounding linguistic heritage, appropriation, and ownership.

In this short piece, Henry provides the short text of his case study, where the linguistic anthropologist is approached by the producers of the hit television program about adapting a local (endangered) language to fit one of the show's mythic peoples. Henry also reflects on the outcomes of working through this case-study with his students, including some of the unanticipated issues that students themselves raised about the case, and the role of the anthropological expert in terms of language revitalization, representation, development, and what ethics means in these moments.

Henry's case-study is a great example of an activity to bring an experiential learning element into the classroom through role-playing. How might you adapt this style of case-study exercise in your own teaching?

Quick links and further reading:

• CASCA's Culture newsletter
• The AAA's Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology edited by Joan Cassell and Sue-Ellen Jacobs
• Chapter 3: Cases and Solutions provides 12 ethics case-studies on general ethical issues raised by practicing anthropologists similar to Henry's case study above
• AAA's Ethics blog
• The Smithsonian's Anthropology Outreach Office has also created an Ethical Dilemmas activity with 6 short case-studies
• anthro everywhere!'s Reading Lists & Syllabi Resources page

Updated 23 August 2017: Henry's article is no longer available via Culture

Water Politics Syllabus & Resources

We have been seeing some very interesting discussions and resources emerging around water politics recently.

Image from "The Rights of the Whanganui River" (Peeps)

In addition to the many discussions happening in relation to #NODAPL and the importance of water to indigenous communities and ways of life in North America, the struggles for access to clean and safe drinking water in places like Flint, Michigan and across reserves in Canada, in March, you may have read the news that a Māori community has been successful in their battle to have New Zealand grant the Whanganui River the legal rights of a person. (The anthropological magazine Peeps published a beautiful photo essay on "The Rights of the Whanganui River" in their second issue earlier this year -- unfortunately, not available online.)

In response to these shifts and public spotlights, we offer readers a couple of interesting resources for thinking and teaching about water politics.

First, we'd like to draw attention to the thematic issue of the Canadian journal of anthropology, Anthropologica, published this past fall (Volume 58, Issue 2): An Amphibious Anthropology: The Production of Place at the Confluence of Land and Water, guest edited by Karine Gagné and Mattias Borg Rasmussen. Contributors to this issue draw on their ethnographic research to share insights into water politics and issues in the Himalayas, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Peru, and North America.

Each of these articles from Anthropologica would be a valuable addition and anthropological contribution to this already well-rounded (anthropology, geography, environmental studies) syllabus: "Water Rights and Social Protest: Politics, Governance, and the Meanings of Access" designed by Jake Blanc and Stepha Velednitsky (graduate students at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE), Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison). 

Quick links and further reading:

• A New Zealand River Now Has The Legal Rights Of A Human (16 March 2017, NPR)
• Peeps magazine
• Karine Gagné and Mattias Borg Rasmussen (eds.). 2016. Anthropologica. Thematic Section: An Amphibious Anthropology: The Production of Place at the Confluence of Land and Water. 58(2). 
• The "Water Rights and Social Protest: Politics, Governance, and the Meanings of Access" syllabus
• This Cultures of Energy podcast episode featuring anthropologist Jessica Barnes (winner of a Wenner-Gren engaged anthropology grant) on water politics in Egypt
• anthro everywhere!'s page on Reading Lists & Syllabi Resources

Book Report Entry #3: Taking Notes from Field notes: A Guided Journal for Doing Anthropology

In our continued feature of Fieldnotes: A 'guided journal' for doing anthropology by Luis A. Vivanco, we're delving into his fourth chapter on Taking Notes in his Doing Fieldwork section of the book.

Vivianco documents the principles of good note taking which he's adapted and modified from Emerson et al. 1995. Some of these principles include:

1. Show, don't tell or summarize events and experiences
2. Avoid generalizing or impressionistic words
3. Avoid projections of emotions
4. Keep a running list of questions

Vivianco's list includes other important principles and reminds me of another blog post I read a while back on Writing Live Fieldnotes by Tricia Wang.

Wang defines live fieldnoting as: 

a blog post that is intended to provide an on-location and synchronous visual and textual coverage of an instance from the ethnographer’s fieldwork. The live fieldnote is created with a image sharing app on a mobile phone that is then shared to other social networking services. Images are accompanied by a description of the image and can also include a brief analysis of what the interaction means to the participants in the image and/or to the ethnographer. 

As part of this process, Wang highlights how these materials are accessible on the internet (although, this may be an issue in certain countries where participants can't reach some social media sites), time stamped and include locating data. Wang argues that live fieldnoting combines what she calls

two activities that are central to ethnographic research: 

1. the ethnographer’s participation in a social world
2. the ethnographer’s written account of the world through her/his participation. 

Live fieldnotes are typically comprised of a one to five sentences. The accumulation of many live fieldnotes works towards producing a “thick description” along with other long form fieldnotes.  Live fieldnotes are not intended to replace the entire fieldnote writing process, rather it is just one of many ways notes can be jotted down for reflection at a later point in time.

Both authors of this blog kept blogs during their PhD research (see for example, When in doubt... Map the city and make kinship charts. An Anthropologist in Amsterdam) yet, this live field notes is something different, perhaps something more 'raw'. 

To bring this discussion back to Vivianco, he writes of the importance of converting "raw" to "cooked" fieldnotes. He writes that this process of returning to the scene and adding details missing in the first "raw" take helps create a more holistic picture, what Wang (from Clifford Geertz) identifies as thick description.

**Jennifer, the author of this post, is reviewing this book from front to back; however, as she flipped through the text after having completed the first draft of this post, she came across Vivianco's own reference to Wang's work in his chapter on 'Going Digital'. Wang's post on ethnographymatters.net definitely has some fans...**

Quick Links:

• Writing Live Fieldnotes by Tricia Wang (August 2, 2012)
• Rhiannon's PhD blog: When in doubt... Map the city and make kinship charts. An Anthropologist in Amsterdam
• Blogging for research (9 January 2017, anthro everywhere!)
• Field Notes: A Guided Journal for Doing Anthropology

Other posts from anthro averywhere!'s ongoing Book Report on Vivanco's Field Notes:

• Book Report Entry #1: Field notes: A Guided Journal for Doing Anthropology (February 20, 2017)
• Book Report Entry #2: Beyond Informants (March 20, 2017)

Bullshit! Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data Syllabus

We came across this syllabus the other day and can think of many ways in which these open access materials and their analysis can be used in anthropology classrooms, communication skills courses, as well as numerous other applications.

On their homepage, the authors write:

The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. 

The authors identify the following learning objectives:

After taking the course, you should be able to:

• Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet.
• Recognize said bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it.
• Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is bullshit.
• Provide a statistician or fellow scientist with a technical explanation of why a claim is bullshit.
• Provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit.

Some of the highlights include:

1. Robert Matthews (2000) Storks deliver babies (p=0.008). Teaching Statistics 22:36-38
2. The Principle of Proportional Ink 
3. How do you know a paper is legit?  
4. Musicians and Mortality 

These are just a few of the many gems found in this treasure trove developed by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West from the University of Washington.

All open access resources. The latest in 'personal education'.

Quick Links and further reading:

• Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data online syllabus
• anthro everywhere!'s:
• Imaginative Ethnography Syllabi (CIE) (February 6, 2017)
• Teaching Ethnography (January 26, 2017)
• Our page of collected Reading Lists & Syllabi Resources

Google Translate from Photos

Did you know that Google Translate now allows you to translate text from photos using the mobile app? (We're living in the future!)

Recent studies have shown that the accuracy of translations using Google Translate has improved tremendously. Although this tool is certainly no substitution for learning a field language, or second (or third) langauge of scholarship, it does present new opportunities for in-the-field and in-text translations.

For instance, many classic scholarly texts will frequently quote non-English texts at length (without offering translations in text or footnotes). In one of the classic texts anthropologists turn to on nationalism, Imagined Communities, the polyglot Anderson does just this -- quoting passages of French and Indonesian at length without translation. Now you can simply snap a picture of the quote and translate it directly through your mobile app to help you work through these examples in making the scholars key arguments.

Anthropology Webinars

Since 2014 the AAA has been hosting regular webinars that are free for anyone to view. You can join in the conversation live, and importantly, catch the lecture/ discussion as an archived video afterward on their website.

Leveraging advances in social media and digital technology, these webinars offer a valuable opportunity to bring scholars together from diverse and distant locales to participate in discussions on breaking research, applied careers, and more.

For instance, you can check out the upcoming Townhall with Anthropologists Action Network for Immigrants and Refugees (15 March 2017) on "Protecting Immigrant and Undocumented Students." Or you might want to scroll through the archived webinars to watch anthropologists working on the frontlines to understand Zika, or catch Amy Santee's discussion about "Practicing Anthropology in User Experience, Design and Business."

Quick link:

• AAA Webinars Event page