The Event! Designing Human Futures

Dr. Paul Hartley came to McMaster last night to give us a talk about Reassessing our (i.e. Humans') Relationship with Technology.

The talk was extremely useful in that it provided attendees with an 'archaeology' of technology.
What do I mean by archaeology? Archaeology, in a Foucaudian sense, examines "discursive traces and orders left by the past in order to write a 'history of the present'. In other words archaeology is about looking at history as a way of understanding the processes that have led to what we are today" (Clare O'Farrell for Michel-Foucault.com, 2007).

Dr. Hartley's main premise of the talk was to reassess how we think about our relationship with technology because much of what we think about technology and the future, is steeped in mythology of the past. If we think technology will 'save' us by making life easier, that it necessarily drives (good) change, or that technologies will bring the human race to the pinnacle of progress - these narratives are not new - in fact, he traced their lineage over centuries - and they do not necessarily have to dictate our future relationship.

Dr. Hartley spoke of the importance of using a human-centered (what he called the Human Futures Framework) to re-articulate this relationship in future design and innovation projects.

In so doing, he gave the audience 5 steps to this process (i.e. the framework):
1. Deconstruct - what you know about your project/product/problem
2. Observe - for the purpose of building a better picture of the context
3. Understand - analyzing collected data within the context
4. Speculate - identify possible future pathways (of design, of interest, of intent, etc.)
5. Activate - generate next steps and understand the implication of the investigation.

In all, Dr. Hartley's talk helped frame our understanding how the technology - as we understand today - came to be. It also helped attendees recognize what steps they could take to use a human futures approach (where the human bookends the technology - as a hybrid form that enables humans instead of any other scary apocalyptic scenarios where robots take over for humans) in our everyday design practices.

Solutionism - The Role of Technology in Solving SocioTechnical Problems

It all began, over a year ago (June 2016), with what author Ethan Zuckerman described as hate-linking. Through this practice, Zuckerman stumbled upon and read an article by Shane Snow who is the co-founder of a content-marketing platform. Briefly, in his article, Snow advocates for change in US prison systems - to lessen the financial burden and remove instances of violence - by locking everyone in a room...indefinitely and by feeding them the Silicon Valley version of Ensure. The role of technology - a crucial point to Zuckerman's response - in this prison life would be to give all those incarcerated access to VR (virtual reality) equipment and video games to socialize and learn. Snow's thought is that with less contact, there will be less violence and deaths.

In his lengthy response, The Perils of Using Technology to Solve Other People's Problems for the Atlantic, Zuckerman systematically pokes holes in Snow's proposed solutions to the US prison system (as a design developed out of context and without input from those living and working in such a system) and questions the role of technology as the prolific savior in sociotechnical issues.

As an engineering instructor at MIT, Zuckerman is interested in finding ways to: disrupt better, challenge knowledgeably, and engaging (or codesigning) new and better technology alongside the intended or target audience. Zuckerman drives home what he sees as an issue in (most) engineering design processes where many of the technologies we benefit from, weren’t designed for their ultimate beneficiaries, but were simply designed well and adopted widely.

Zuckerman draws attention to Evgeny Morozov's critique of “solutionism” which Morozov describes as the act of focusing on problems that (only) have “nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.” The problem with the solutionist critique, Zuckerman argues, is that it tends to remove technological innovation from the problem-solver’s toolkit. He advocates that robust solutions to social problems must incorporate technology as one of many levers toward social change.

Zuckerman mentions the work of Genevieve Bell at intel to briefly mention the role of ethnography and ethnographers in collecting important user information in the design process. He writes:
Understanding the wants and needs of users is important when you’re designing technologies for people much like yourself, but it’s utterly critical when designing for people with different backgrounds, experiences, wants, and needs.

Although an older article, Zuckerman's response to Snow's design situates anthropological and ethnographic analysis into the heart of the design process, where the heart does not represent the centre of a process, but the life blood of design and innovation. It's here that the expert - that is the user or client or target audience - and their knowledge is paramount.

Quick Links: 

Perils of Using Technology to Solve Other People's Problems: What will it take to design socio-technical systems that actually work? Ethan Zuckerman in the Atlantic (June 23, 2016)

How Soylent and Oculus Could Fix The Prison System (A Thought Experiment) - note, this has been revised due to feedback from the wider community - Shane Snow (Sept 23, 2015) 

For more links about technology on AnthroEverywhere!

Isuma TV - Indigenous Media collective (Sept 4 2017)

Anthropology Podcasting (Aug 24 2017)

Remembering & Memories: there's an app for that... (Jul 17 2017)

Isuma TV - Indigenous Media collective

We recently came across Isuma TV, "a collaborative multimedia platform for indigenous filmmakers and media organizations. Each user can design their own space, or channel, to reflect their own identity, mandate and audience."

The result of this non-profit collaboration is an amazing collection of "over 6000 videos, and thousands of other images and audio files, in more than 80 different languages, on 800+ user-controlled channels, representing cultures and media organizations from Canada, U.S.A., Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and all over Latin America."

Where some viewers might be attracted to content in channels like Inuit knowledge and climate change, others might be interested in how Indigenous communities are using the platform to help teach and share knowledge about Indigenous cultures and languages.

Check it out, and let us know how Isuma TV might be useful in your classroom via twitter @anthrolens or email anthrolens@gmail.com.

Anthropology Podcasting

Heard any great podcasts lately? What about anthropology podcasts?

We've posted about anthropology and podcasting before on anthro everywhere! as a way of communicating ethnography in a different format, as Dr. Lindsay Bell has done with her students. Podcasting can be an opportunity to engage a wider or different audience than text-based communications. The medium and our possible audiences might also challenge us to think through and present theoretical ideas and ethnographic details as a public anthropologist speaking to a perhaps non-specialist audience.

So, what about the podcasts that are already out there? You might be surprised that so many anthropological associations and initiatives have jumped into podcasting to share our insights. From audio versions of academic lectures to more intimate conversations about ideas, here's a by no means definitive list for your listening pleasure:

• As you might have suspected, the RAI Lectures podcasts are audio files of keynote lectures given mostly by anthropological rock-stars on a variety of topics.
• This Anthro Life might be the best known anthropology podcast. Episodes run about 20-30 minutes, and are put together by a team of grad students on issues "inspired by Anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s claim that anthropology’s job is to make the world safe for human differences."
• AnthroPod: The SCA Podcast is hosted by Cultural Anthropology  in line with their open-access format and mission. Many episodes deliver interviews with anthropologists on their work, while others explore particular issues more broadly. Episodes vary from about 30-60 minutes in length.
• A Story of Us comes from Ohio State's Anthropology graduate students, with series themes from researchers in the department, such as childhood, death, and migration.
• Anthropological Airwaves is American Anthropologist's new podcast series, and aims to mirror the journal's "four-field, multimodal research, the podcast hosts conversations about anthropological projects—from fieldwork and publishing to the discipline’s role in public debates."
• Oxford Podcasts from the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. With over 200 episodes since 2010, this podcast showcases lecture and seminar discussions from the department.
• Thinking Allowed is BBC4's ethnography podcast, which bills itself as "New research on how society works." While the presenter, Laurie Taylor, is a sociologist by training, the focus really is on the value and power of an ethnographic perspective.
• The Sociological Imagination podcasts from a sociological and interdisciplinary perspective, and is worth including in this list. It's also a great site to mine for further listening, through posts like "The LSE’s remarkable archive of public talks."
• You can also check out AAA's Podcast Library and its impressive list of archived podcasts, which include episodes covering the four-fields of anthropology.

Inspired to make your own podcasts? Check out this informative piece on the podcasting medium, "Talking Anthropology: Podcasting for the Public," (and Part 2) from Teaching Culture for ideas about how to craft your own and/or bring podcasting into the classroom.

Know about other great anthropology podcasts that should be on this list? Tweet us @anthrolens or email anthrolens@gmail.com. Here are few more from readers like you:

• Updated - 25 August 2017: From the Relevanth blog, Anthropologist on the Street interviews anthropologists and others about "today’s controversies, debates, and trending issues to examine the hidden cultural forces at play."
• Updated - 27 August 2017: The Sausage of Science Podcast with Cara & Chris is a new podcast series from the Human Biology Association. This podcast "combines interviews and lectures with and by new researchers and research in science writ large and that applies to those interested in the field of human biology."
• Updated - 27 August 2017: You might also want to check out The Leakey Foundation's Origin Stories, podcasting "about what it means to be human and the science behind what we know about ourselves and our origins."
• Updated - 10 November 2017: Thanks to René Herrera for alerting us to AnthroAlert - live on Fridays or catch up on past episodes with this public anthropology project (@AnthroAlert).
• Updated - 14 January 2018: Have you heard The Familiar Strange podcast yet? Besides having a great name, this project in public anthropology is supported by the "Australian Anthropological Society, and the Australian National University’s Schools of Culture, History and Language, Archeology and Anthropology, and the Centre for Public Awareness of Science." They've got a blog too!

The Packaging Anthropological Knowledge Part Two

As an anthropologist teaching technical communications, I often reflect on the merits of active, concise, and accessible communication styles that I didn't learn while studying my undergraduate or graduate degrees.

If I were to summarize how I would change my anthropological writing on account of teaching technical writing, I would advocate for the following three rules:

1. Write in an active voice. Always. 
2. Connect all the dots. Give readers a sense for what they're going to read, write it, then summarize it for them. It's not a mystery novel. Descriptive prose has a place of course (C. Geertz need not roll over in his grave) - perhaps in ethnographic vignettes or when describing initial contexts or landscapes.
3. Write with information/knowledge dissemination in mind. Accessible writing will make your ideas spread further.

Academia Obscura recently (Jul 28 2017) posted about a resource for academics, Doodling for Academics by Julie Schumacher. The publisher's website writes that the resources is a bitingly funny distraction designed to help you survive life in higher education without losing your mind. Sardonic yet shrewdly insightful, Doodling for Academics offers the perfect cognitive relief for the thousands of faculty and grad students whose mentors and loved ones failed to steer them toward more reasonable or lucrative field.

Below are two sample doodles from the book. You can access a sampler of the book here.

Doodle from Julie Schumacher via Academia Obscura

Doodle from Julie Schumacher via Academia Obscura

While this book is supposed to be a fun mental release from the hierarchies and pseudo-political power plays, the peculiar colleagues, the over-parented students, the stacks of essays that need to be graded ASAP - I also see these doodles as examples of repackaging knowledge in new and accessible ways. 

While these doodles may be the starting point for larger discussions (as the medium would limit the capacity to elaborate on complex ideas), I can think of a place for such doodles in ethnographic texts perhaps as a means to personalize readers' experiences of the work as a colouring book (the original intention of Schumacher's book). 

One could also use such doodles and the act of colouring as a methodology. For example, I'm reminded of Diane Farmer, Jeanette Cepin, and Gabrielle Breton-Carbonneau's article in the Journal of Social Science Education which can be found here Students’ Pathways Across Local, National and Supra-National Borders: Representations of a Globalized World in a Francophone Minority School in Ontario, Canada

Any time that I see Anthropologists and Scientists try to disseminate their work in new and creative ways, I can see its role as publicly engaged intellectuals.

Quick Links:

• Students’ Pathways Across Local, National and Supra-National Borders: Representations of a Globalized World in a Francophone Minority School in Ontario, Canada Diane Farmer, Jeanette Cepin, and Gabrielle Breton-Carbonneau (3-2015 JSSE)
• Doodling for Academics: A colouring and activity book. Julie Schumacher (2017)
• Doodling for Academics - A sampler. Julie Schumacher (2017)
• Doodling for Academics. Academia Obscura (July 28, 2017)
• The Packaging of Anthropological Knowledge and Its Merits According to Market Research Experts. Anthro Everywhere! (June 29 2017)

Remembering & Memories: there's an app for that...

As we've posted about before, the adoption of new media and technology in our lives has an impact on our social lives in many interesting ways. In many ways, new technological platforms -- such as digital communications and social media -- are already embedded with certain cultural assumptions. At the same time, there are always unexpected outcomes and unforeseen ways in which the incorporation of new media and technology shape our relationships with others, our environments, and ourselves.

Facebook Memories

This relationship between cultural actors -- including the new digital "memory" systems in our lives -- is what Molly Sauter (PhD student in Communications Studies) addresses in Instant Recall (27 June 2017, Real Life). In this short analytical piece, Sauter addresses three types of memory system and how they have shaped our memories, and the act of remembering: predictive text, "data doppelgangers constructed for ad targeting," and more particularly, reminiscence databases (e.g. Facebook Memories).

Sauter explores how digital evocations of memory differ from physical ones, such as "yearbooks, photographs, cars, houses, trees, gravestones."

These physical evocations age, and their value and veracity as objects of testimony ages with them and us. They date, they fade, they display their distance from the events they are connected to and their distance from us. Digital memory objects, on the other hand, although they might abruptly obsolesce, do not age in the same way. They remain flatly, shinily omni-accessible, represented to us cleanly both in the everlasting ret-conned context of their creation and consumption. 

Contrast this algorithmic "remembering" with how another contributor to Real Life describes the nostalgic recreation of community online through her mother's experience using Facebook in "Post, Memory" (7 July 2016, Real Life). Kelli Korducki's mother had grown up in a small Salvadoran village, once decimated by civil war, and now rebuilt online as a closed Facebook group called “Memorias de ______,” boasting "a membership in the low hundreds, which is impressive given the village’s reasonably small size." 

In this digital community space, "long-lost neighbors and relatives resumed contact after decades of quiet separation, strewn from Virginia to Montreal to Los Angeles and points above, below, and in between." On Facebook, members and diaspora descendants of this scattered community came together, sharing and creating artifacts of the long-gone community, juxtaposed with images and details of the living village today.

What do these different insights onto the intersections of memory or the act of remembering with social media tell us about everyday life? How might these examples be useful in discussing social relationships, memory, cultural artifacts, or even imagined communities?


Quick links:

• Instant Recall (27 June 2017, Real Life)
• Post, Memory (7 July 2016, Real Life)
• You might also want to check out some of the other pieces in Real Life magazine, which all address aspects of living with technology -- including a number of articles that incorporate an anthropological perspective.
• Media, language, and social relationships (20 April 2017, anthro everwhere!)
• Anthropologizing Software and Design (12 January 2017, anthro everwhere!)

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)

Science, objectivity, race, gender

Have you heard of Space + Anthropology? This group blog through Medium.com brings together commentaries on the intersections between tech, culture, space, sci-fi, art, and anthropology. We already blogged in a past post of reading lists and syllabi about Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's fantastic Decolonising Science Reading List.

Other eye-catching pieces from Space + Anthropology include "Native Sci-fi Films and Trailers"
by William Lempert and Michael Oman-Reagan's "Anthropology in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”." But we want to highlight another piece by Prescod-Weinstein: "The Self-Construction of Black Women Physicists" based on a talk she gave at Yale’s Critical Histories, Activist Futures: “Decolonizing Science by Reconstructing Observers.”

Where the work of science is to continuously excavate the boundaries of what we do not know, it becomes clear that the relationship between the questions we ask and the axioms of scientist-construction has epistemic meaning for what we may come to know about physics.
To be Black means to have your capacity to have an insightful epistemic standpoint constantly questioned. ... This epistemic alienation serves a status quo where communities at the margins are excluded from discourse about what science is and whom it serves.

How might this piece by Prescod-Weinstein be useful in raising the complexities of and intersections between science, objectivity, race, and gender with our students? How do hegemonic cultural assumptions shape how knowledge is created, validated, and disseminated?

Quick links and further reading:

• Space + Anthropology blog
• Prescod-Weinstein's "The Self-Construction of Black Women Physicists"
• Prescod-Weinstein's Decolonising Science Reading List
• anthro everywhere's
• Reading Lists for Decolonizing Anthropology & Beyond (15 December 2016)
• How gender changes our jobs (24 October 2016)

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

Anthropologizing Software and Design

Charles Pearson is an anthropologist working in tech who has written a few great articles for Medium on his experiences.

In his recent piece, "Why Every Software Team Needs an Anthropologist" (2016, Medium), Pearson answers the question by weaving together the example of "everybody’s favorite start-up right now — Pied Piper" from HBO's Silicon Valley with his own experiences working in the tech industry. In the show, the start-up's amazing new technology flops at the end of Season 3, quite clearly because as Pearson notes, "the Pied Piper team didn’t step out of their echo chamber, and ultimately failed completely to understand the values and expectations of their potential userss. They didn’t design with them in mind. Consequently, the team’s enginneer’y values and assumptions, explicit in the platform, were completely irrelevant to everybody else." This is where having a researcher on the design team, like an anthropologist, can help. Because anthropologists know that "technology is cultural and all software is baked with certain values and premises."

Pearson argues that anthropologists' unique approach, with our "toolbox of cultural theory and ethnographic methods" can offer the tech industry the kinds of insights into design for users that is necessary for success.

If you want to read more about anthropologists working in the tech industry, check out Pearson's other pieces at Medium or our page on Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university.

Quick links & further reading:

• Pearson's Medium articles: "Why Every Software Team Needs an Anthropologist" (2016, Medium) + "Ethnography = Better Design" (2015), and "My Two Years as an Anthropologist on the Photoshop Team" (2015).
• anthro everywhere!'s Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university page
• Articulating the Anthropological Toolkit to Non-Anthropologists (15 September 2016)

Blogging for research

There are many reasons why anthropologists and other social scientists choose to blog. For instance, anthro everywhere! began as a way to share resources with instructors, students, and others who were interested in an anthropological perspective. Blogging is also an interesting tool to use during research and for sharing research results, as sociologist Mark Carrigan writes in a post from The Sociological Imagination: 7 ways to use a blog as a research journal.

Carrigan argues that writing a blog can be useful for:

1. Recording particularly powerful extracts of texts to which I might wish to refer later
2. Capturing ideas and insights which occur, usually when engaging with the ideas of others
3. Brainstorming sessions in response to particular ideas or around particular themes
4. Longer form reflections on particular topics
5. Sharing ‘homeless’ bits of academic work that have been cut from papers
6. Developing conference presentations
7. Planning forthcoming writing projects

As the authors of anthro everywhere! can attest from writing their own research blogs while in the field, you might also use blogging to:

• give potential participants a point of reference about your research
• recruit participants to your study
• keep in the habit of writing and work through some of the themes that you see emerging from your research as it unfolds
• disseminate your research in an open-access format (as was the case for a project Jennifer worked on during her post-doc: Cultural Diversity and the Workplace)
• build your digital identity as a researcher (see also: Advice for Grad Students)

Free Online Tools for Instructors

This list of free online tools for instructors began from thinking about the kinds of tools that we use in our own teaching and researching -- but also how the ways in which we design assignments, organize, analyse, and present out research might change if we were more familiar with other kinds of tools. For instance, if you were more familiar with audio editing tools, would you consider podcasting your research or making a podcast part of a class research assignment like Dr. Lindsay Bell?

If readers have suggestions to add to this preliminary list, we would love to add to them! Email (anthrolens at gmail.com) or tweet us (@anthrolens) with your suggestions.

GROUP PROJECT TOOLS - There are now lots of apps available for free to help groups work together, apart. Here are a couple that might be useful for committee or student-group work.

• With Doodle groups can create a simple poll to find out when is best to schedule a meeting. 
• Slack provides a platform for group messaging and file sharing, with a few other features as well (such as new message notifications when working offline).
• Survey Monkey allows you to create, distribute and analyse the data of surveys online. 
• Create shared electronic annotations with Hypothes.is. As a way of re-thinking reading assignemnts in his upper year anthropology seminar, "Brian Watkins instructed students to make three annotations on each reading using the Hypothes.is platform." (Check out Hypothes.is' educators' page here.)  Read more about it and other 'get student to read' tools/ strategies in this Cultural Anthropology piece.

AUDIO/VISUAL EDITING TOOLS - Dr. Laurie Baker (agencyanthropologist.ca) has shared a wonderful and extensive list of free/ opensource graphic and video editing tools. How might you use these to change how you or your students present your research, give group presentations, or practice public anthropology?

Graphic creation

• Canva
• Pablo
• Piktochart - Easy infographics

Graphic/photo editing

• Gimp
• Pixlr

Video editing/3D rendering

• Blender

Free stock imagery

• Pexels
• Unsplash
• Pixabay
• PixelSquid - 3D graphics

GRAPHICS TOOLS - Basic tools and resources for adding graphics to presentations, etc.

• Word clouds are a fun way to visualize information for a conference or lecture slide. This site gives you different options for shapes and fonts, and has a handy wizard for first-time users.
• We have made a few posts already about Maps/ Mapping but here are some of those links again: 



Anthropology Major Fox

• Decolonial Atlas is a blog that collects all kinds of maps which are categorized by region, but also by subject (e.g. languages, biocultural diversity, historical maps, non-North orientations...). [Decolonial Atlas, 29 August 2016] 
• The True Size of Africa map and The True Size Of... were tools we originally posted about in Africa is not a country! (6 April 2016). The latter is an interactive tool that allows you to drag and drop countries/ regions into other parts of the world on a map to compare the true size of each -- underscoring the problems with the common Mercator Projection maps.
• Sociological Images is a community Pinterest page that has collected together and categorized many different images, especially related to gender, sexuality, race, and media. 
• A bit silly, but Anthropology Major Fox meme-generator can help you to create simple text images for slides. You can also check through their gallery to find gems like this one.

PLANNING TOOLS and DATA ORGANIZATION

• What is Evernote and how to use it (A Nerds Guide On Using Evernote Effectively)
• Cloud storage already pretty common now with free and premium services available through sites like DropBox or Google Docs. These services allow you to access your documents anywhere you have an internet connection - and can also allow groups working remotely to collaborate on the same documents in real time.
• If This Then That (IFTTT) is a tool that allows you to automate certain actions using their 'recipes'. For instance, anthro everywhere! uses it to automatically send out a tweet (@anthrolens) every time that a new post is published on the blog. But you can also do things like link your gmail or twitter and evernote accounts to automatically save certain messages, or track certain hashtag mentions on twitter in a Google spreadsheet, or use it to automatically create a twitter list from a specific #hashtag.

Mapping the world?

At anthro everywhere! we've already written a couple of posts about how maps powerfully represent certain social realities. Today's post adds a couple of new resources for teaching about the power of maps as a tool of social and political as well as geographic representation:

This video from Vox (via their faceBook page; run-time 6 minutes) gives a brief history of the mathematical problem of trying to accurately represent the three-dimensional world in a nice, neat two-dimensional format -- and the distortions that result from that impossibility:


The "Dymaxion Map," also known as the Fuller Projection Map, seems to be the closest mathematical solution to flattening the globe.

For other resources and links on mapping a representation, check out our earlier posts:

• Decolonial Atlas (29 August 2016)
• Africa is not a country! (6 April 2016)

Serious academics & managing your digital identity

One of the things that we try to do on the blog besides offer interesting examples of anthropology everywhere, is to try to highlight advice on professionalization for anthropology graduates and graduate students.

This past August, the Academics Anonymous column in The Guardian's Higher Education Network published "I'm a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer"

For the young PhD 'serious academic' author of this piece, their concern seems to stem from the seemingly new demand that academics participate in social media to demonstrate their enthusiasm, engagement, impact, etc. The article closes with this lament about one more obligation in the busy life of a graduate student/ scholar:

But surely the dedication I show in the lab, and the subsequent data I collect, should speak for itself. I do not – and should not – have to parade myself online to please my employer or to stake my claim as a good researcher. Can’t we save the showing off for where it’s really needed, in the dreaded grant applications?

#SeriousAcademic backlash

Not surprisingly this article sparked an interesting discussion about what it means to be a "serious academic" today. Later that same day, The Guardian published a response from Dean Burnett in the science section, "I’m a non-serious academic. I make no apologies for this." The Chronicle of Higher Education responded with their own piece, "What Is a ‘Serious Academic’? Social-Media Critique Provokes a Backlash." And other responses followed from across social media platforms, such as The Tatooed Prof's "I’ve Got a Serious Problem with “Serious Academics.”"

Given that even the most serious academics working their way through graduate school at the moment wont end up in the traditional (or their anticipated) serious academic job -- a tenure-track professorship -- thinking about the role of social media in academia is an important issue.

More than just self-promotion, social media can offer a way to network beyond face-to-face encounters at annual conferences. It can be a way of learning about interesting work being done by professionals in areas of interest to you, pointing to career paths you might never have otherwise encountered. It can also be an opportunity for engagement beyond the ivory tower by using social media as a platform to translate your research and perspective into accessible, public discussion.

But for the many of us who will not end up working in the university for the rest of our careers, managing our digital identities through social media is actually a smart way to help build your professional identity. While the anonymous 'serious academic' noted above sarcastically acknowledges the possibility (pushed by 'career-advice gurus') that "potential employers could be Googling your name right now," the reality is that your digital identity is a factor for many potential employers.

A recent study conducted by researchers at York University underscored this reality:

The study found that those job seekers who did actively manage their digital image were more likely to be looked on favorably by employers. Budworth and Harrison found that employers paid attention to verbal as well as non-verbal information. Verbal information includes a listing of accomplishments, stories that shed a positive light on abilities, and suggestions of competence in various areas. Non-verbal information includes things like professional photographs.

Interestingly, the researchers found that for women conscientious management of your digital presence mattered even more than for men, and could have higher rewards:

What surprised the researchers is that women who deliberately manage their digital presence were rated higher by potential employers than men, and that extended to verbal self-promotion and the posting of professional photographs.

For more advice on how and why to cultivate your own digital presence, you can check out the links on our Advice for Grad Students page. Scroll down to "Developing an online professional identity" in the Professional Development Strategies section.

Quick links & further reading:

• "I'm a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer" (5 August 2016, The Guardian)
• "I’m a non-serious academic. I make no apologies for this." (5 August 2016, The Guardian)
• "What Is a ‘Serious Academic’? Social-Media Critique Provokes a Backlash." (5 August 2016, The Chronicle of Higher Education)
• "Yes, Serious Academics Should Absolutely Use Social Media" (6 August 2016, Forbes)
• "I’ve Got a Serious Problem with “Serious Academics.”" (5 August 2016, The Tatooed Professor)
• Online presence could affect job seeker's hiring chances and salary: York U study (30 July 2015)
• "What is a PhD, anyway?" (19 October 2016, University Affairs)
• anthro everywhere!'s  Advice for Grad Students page

How gender changes our jobs

One of the things I love about teaching anthropology is thinking about and showing how -- through everyday experiences -- broad processes shape local lives.

I think that these connections come out very clearly in this piece from The Atlantic, "What Programming's Past Reveals About Today's Gender-Pay Gap" (2016). The hook of the piece is that computer programming, which is now a male-dominated field, actually began as a career considered particularly suited to women. So, what happened?

The answer comes down in a very real way to how our

Margaret Hamilton, Programmer for NASA (1969)

conceptions of “expertise” are inseparable from gender. As Judy Wajcman, a sociology professor at the London School of Economics, has argued, “The classification of women’s jobs as unskilled and men’s jobs as skilled frequently bears little relation to the actual amount of training or ability required for them. Skill definitions are saturated with gender bias.” Gender stereotypes pervade definitions of competence and status, contrasting work that requires brain or brawn; mathematical or verbal ability; individualism or cooperation. When an occupation undergoes a shift in gender composition, the description of the job often morphs to better align with the gender of the incoming hires—such as when programming went from being understood as clerical work suitable for women to a job that demands advanced mathematical facility. When women replaced men as typists, it went from a job that was seen as requiring physical stamina to one that needed a woman’s dexterity. In providing profiles not only the male-dominated field of programming, but the female-dominated field of teaching, this piece underscores how our perceptions of different careers, their power, prestige, and the paycheck that goes along with them is deeply coloured by our culturally-informed ideas of gender.

Dr. Christine Darden. Courtesy NASA

This piece is also interesting to use to think about how structure and actions based on socially constructed qualities associated (even unconsciously) with gender and race have helped to shape certain fields, and to keep individuals out of working in certain fields, e.g. women and people of colour in STEM.

Quick links & further reading:

• "What Programming's Past Reveals About Today's Gender-Pay Gap" (The Atlantic, 2016)
• How does language shape our worldview? (17 October 2016) and other anthro everywhere! posts on language
• "Margaret Hamilton, the Engineer Who Took the Apollo to the Moon" (Medium, 2014)
• "Meet the Black Female Mathematicians Who Helped America Win the Space Race" (Observer, 2016)
• "What's Up with Chicks in Science?" Neil Degrasse Tyson responds to an old white dude about minorities (African-Americans and Women) in Science (YouTube, 3.30 minutes)
• "Alabama scientist, one of nation's few black female physicists, breaks ground in cancer research" (AL.com, 2016)

Resource: Transitioning from high school to post-secondary education

Many students struggle with culture shock as they make the transition between high school and post-secondary education. New freedoms for many students living away from home for the first time also mean new responsibilities and stresses. To this end, teenmentalhealth.org has created their Transitions resource to provide students with information and support strategies. From their website:

“Transitions”, the first publication of its kind,  provides first-year students with information on topics including time management, relationships, sexual activity, mental illness, suicide and addictions. The guide also includes mental health self-help information and contains recommendations where students can go to get help on their campus. 

Free for download as .pdf in book or pocket (mobile) versions, instructors may be interested in sharing this resource with their students, or checking out their Resources for Educators.

Quick links:

• Transitions (book and pocket versions) for download
• teenmentalhealth.org website with additional resources and links
• Resources for Educators
• Resources for Parents
• Resources for Friends

Podcasting (ethnography) in the classroom

Anthropologist Lindsay A. Bell has written a two-part post for Teaching Culture on "her attempt to organize a senior seminar course around producing a podcast based on student research" (2016).

Following Carole McGranahan's "What Makes Something Ethnographic?" (2012, Savage Minds), Bell discusses how she and her students created an ethnography of experiences of living and growing up in the Rust Belt. This project not only helped her students work through what we mean by ethnography, but also some of what she calls the dilemmas of ethnography: asking anthropological questions, the issue of 'ideal' data, recursivity, and representation.

Bell's posts are interesting for what they can tell us about teaching ethnography, what it means for students to learn and 'do' ethnography. In addition to recounting her experiences of this assignment, she also offers tips and advice to instructors who may want to take on a similar project in their classes.

Quick links & additional links:

• Bell's posts for Teaching Culture (2016): Part 1: Life in America, Part 2: Podcast Pedagogy
• Carole McGranahan's "What Makes Something Ethnographic?" (2012, Savage Minds)
• The ethnographic podcast produced by Bell's students: "Life in the Rust Belt" (2016)
• Podcasts via The Sociological Imagination 

Why aren't millennials buying diamonds?

link to original tweet @TheEconomist

Earlier this week, The Economist magazine asked the Twittersphere a question: Why aren't millennials buying diamonds?

Unsurprisingly, this question generated a lot of (angry) feedback.

If you actually follow the links to the different articles that The Economist has published, it becomes clear that the authors have a few answers to why "the diamond industry is being upended," as a later tweet explained. In one link, the threat to the diamond industry comes from the production of new synthetic and conflict-free diamonds. According to a similar story,

In 2003 the diamond industry responded to concerns that sales of illicit stones were being used to finance warfare in Africa by launching the Kimberley Process certification scheme. This was designed to make diamonds traceable, but focuses only on the ones that pay for rebel armies. Man-made diamonds spare millennials and others the headache of worrying that they are supporting human-rights abuses under repressive regimes such as Zimbabwe’s. Adding Hollywood glamour to the moral appeal is Leonardo DiCaprio, an investor in a synthetic-diamonds startup.

Yes, ethical consumption practices do play an important role in why millennials aren't buying diamonds. But, to think that ethical consumerism (and the new choice to purchase ethical synthetic stones) is the only reason, certainly does not provide a holistic answer. It also completely bypasses the question of 'value' that anthropologist Andrew Walsh has written about in relation to 'authentic' versus 'synthetic' sapphires...

What is interesting is that neither of The Economist's stories pick up on the threads that irate millennial tweeters rightly drew into the conversation. Such threads are picked up by an article for The Daily Beast (Lacking Sparkle: Why Have Millennials Fallen Out of Love With Diamonds?): Russell Shor, senior industry analyst at the Gemological Institute of America, said that the decline of diamond sales in the US

"is because of the different priorities of twentysomethings. “People in the millennial generation need to save more. If you’re a young person trying to buy a house in this market where housing prices have risen and wages still haven’t caught up, obviously you aren’t thinking about buying really expensive diamonds.”"

In the classroom, posing The Economist's question: "why aren't millennials buying diamonds?" might be a useful discussion question to open broader conversation about a number of important topics, such as: ethical consumerism, the idea of authenticity and value, or how the relative poverty of millennials compared to their parents is actually part of the same global economic system that has lead to the production of conflict diamonds.

Quick links and further reading:

• The Economist: Shine On (2016); In the Rough (2016)
• The Economist's provocative tweet and responses (via Twitter)
• Lacking Sparkle: Why Have Millennials Fallen Out of Love With Diamonds? (2016, The Daily Beast)
• Anthropologist Andrew Walsh's website and Academia.edu pages. Recommended reading: 
• 2010  The Commoditization of Fetishes: Telling the Difference between Natural and Synthetic Sapphires.  American Ethnologist, 37(1): 97-113.
• 2012  Made in Madagascar: Sapphires, Ecotourism, and the Global Bazaar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Anthropologist, CTO

Is it really that strange to think that an anthropologist would be the best choice for a Chief Technology Officer?

According to Susannah Fox, the CTO for HHS (U.S. Health and Human Services), no, it shouldn't be:

“We’re living through this time right now where technology is a Trojan Horse for change ... . We say technology, but we mean innovation. We say interoperability and open data, but we mean culture change. And this is why the HHS CTO is an anthropologist. I know about culture change. I know how difficult it is for everyone involved.” (mobihealthnews.com, 2016)

For Fox, part of this cultural change has to do with understanding patients' needs, and the technology hacks that people are already doing, as in the #WeAreNotWaiting movement among people living with diabetes.

 Quick links & further reading:

• "HHS CTO: Technology in healthcare is a Trojan Horse for culture change" (mobihealthnews.com, 2016)
• "Why An Anthropologist, Not A Technologist Was The Best Choice For HHS CTO Role" (2016, Forbes)
• #WeAreNotWaiting via twitter
• Fox' blog post, "Love made visible" (2013) in which she reflects on her archaeology/ anthropology background and what this brings to her work in the healthcare sector.
• anthro everywhere's page, "Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university"