Finding anthropology everywhere in 2016... more posts in 2017!

Jennifer and I want to send our thanks to everyone who has read and shared anthro everywhere! during 2016. With our first posts on this new blog beginning in February, we've shared 130 posts and 4 special topics pages with you over the past year, including:

• Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university
• Advice for Grad Students
• and Jennifer's observations and analysis from her trip to Japan in our Special Series: Ethnography & Tourism (13, 20, 27 October 2016)

We'll be taking a break from posting until the new year, but until then here is a round-up of 10 of our favourite/ most popular posts from this past year:

• Who makes the news? (8 March 2016)
• The Anthropology of Trump: It's getting political in here (18 March 2016) and Turning an ethnographic lens on Trumpland (7 November 2016)
• Africa is not a country! (6 April 2016)
• A Little Social Science Cheerleading (7 June 2016)
• Mass Violence and Teachable Moments (13 June 2016)
• How To Support Blacademics & Be an Ally (8 July 2016)
• Podcasting (ethnography) in the classroom (11 July 2016)
• Articulating the Anthropological Toolkit to Non-Anthropologists (15 September 2016)
• How gender changes our jobs (24 October 2016)
• Serious academics & managing your digital identity (24 November 2016)

Thanks for reading -- we'll be back in 2017!

Reading Lists for Decolonizing Anthropology & Beyond

One of the ways that anthropologists and other scholars have responded to recent world events -- from the systemic issues underlying the Black Lives Matter movement and Standing Rock, to Brexit and the rise of Trump -- has been in the classroom. Here is a (by no means exhaustive) list of some of the great resources for building a syllabus and classroom discussions around some of these current events. You can also check out our new page that has collected together various posts already published on our blog about reading lists and syllabi.

• The Decolonizing Anthropology series via Savage Minds, reflecting and building on the work of Faye Harrison, is a good place to start thinking about what it means to decolonize anthropology.
• In response to the recent events at Standing Rock, an interdisciplinary syllabus was created by the NYC Stands for Standing Rock committee "a group of Indigenous scholars and activists, and settler/ POC supporters": Standing Rock Syllabus
• Less a syllabus than a resource, the Native Voices: Native Peoples' Concepts of Health and Illness (U.S. National Library of Medicine) is an exhibition that "explores diverse Native Peoples’ concepts of health and illness, past and present." The site provides things like video interviews with indigenous healers, leaders, and biomedical professionals, as well as other activities and suggested readings.
• We've already posted about Anthropoliteia's #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus. This ongoing project is anthropology-focused.
• There's also the interdisciplinary The Black Lives Canada Syllabus (#BlackLivesCDNSyllabus) Google Doc for those looking for a little more CanCon.
• This Decolonising Science Reading List has been put together by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (#BlackandSTEM theoretical astro|physicist), where "You’ll find texts that range from personal testimony to Indigenous cosmology to anthropology, to history to sociology to education research. All are key to the process of decolonising science, which is a pedagogical, cultural, and intellectual set of interlocking structures, ideas, and practices."
• And lastly for this post, here is a Google Doc reading list of Ethnographic approaches to understanding Trump/Brexit/new rise of conservativism.

Add it to the dictionary! Changing language, changing culture

This short article about Merriam-Webster's addition of 'genderqueer' to their dictionary is really useful for thinking about how language changes over time to describe our changing cultural worlds. According to the Hufftington Post, the dictionary's

commitment to adding new queer terms and language to the dictionary, and discussing them on social media, follows the evolution of culture.
“The set of terms relating to gender and sexuality that we’ve added in recent years is like any other; as established members of the language ― we have evidence of these terms in published, edited text from a variety of sources and over an extended period of time ― they meet our criteria for entry,” Emily Brewster, Merriam-Webster Associate Editor, told The Huffington Post. “We would be remiss not to define them.”

What does the emergence of new words tell us about our changing cultural world -- in this case about how we understand and express our gender and sexuality?

Quick links and further reading:

• Merriam-Webster Has Become A Hilarious, Shade-Throwing LGBTQ Ally 
• Other related posts on changing language and culture:
• The mutability of language (LOL!) (9 March 2016)
• How gender changes our jobs (24 October 2016)
• A historical view of a long heated debate: what could be more menacing than the singular "they"? (8 September 2016)
• Avoiding gendered bias... for instructors (25 May 2016)
• Indigenous languages and gender (10 March 2016)
• How does language shape our worldview? (17 October 2016)