Blog Profile / Savage Minds
| URL : | http://savageminds.org/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Anthropology | |
| Posts on Regator: | 1235 | |
| Posts / Week: | 4.6 | |
| Archived Since: | March 16, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Practical Training for the Digitally Il/literate Anthropologist
Most graduate programs in anthropology require us to take a course in methods to prepare us to “do anthropology” on our own. In class, we discuss what makes a good research question, the tradeoffs between qualitative and quantitative data, and the importance of taking good field notes. Sometimes we even get to conduct research and […]
Summer reading…
The semester is over and grades are in. My family just moved to a bigger place –one block down the street, actually — thanks to my wife’s tenure promotion. And the stress of the two combined, plus Herculean applications of caffeine and alcohol (I thought they were supposed to cancel each other out, no?) has […]
Savage Minds Interview: Sarah Kendzior
Sarah Kendzior is a writer for Al Jazeera English. She has a PhD in cultural anthropology from Washington University and researches the political effects of digital media in the former USSR. You can find her work at sarahkendzior.com, and on Twitter: @sarahkendzior Ryan Anderson: First of all, thanks for doing this interview. Let’s start […]
#Adderall: Positionality and Ethics in Social Media Research
Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger TAZ KARIM In the past five years, Twitter has become a mecca for social science researchers: the number of topics, informants, and networks waiting to be analyzed are limitless (here are some examples). With the help of a nifty program like Tweet Archivist, you could literally collect thousands of micro-narratives […]
The Academic Benefits of Twitter
Why Twitter? What value does Twitter offer to an academic? And, are you missing out if you are not on Twitter? Yesterday someone I follow (@bacigalupe) posted a link to a Digital Sociology post titled “Can academics manage without Twitter?” My answer was: of course they can. Academics do not need to be on Twitter, [...]
Anthro News takes on the adjunct crisis, and while commenting will cost you, the irony is free
This just in. It appears that the AAA is starting to address some of the serious issues that adjunct scholars are facing day in and day out. In a new post on the Anthropology News site, AAA president Leith Mullings takes on the adjunct issue. This is good news, because this issue seriously needs some [...]
Peer Review and Congressional Oversight – An Invited Post
[The following is an invited post by Megan Tracy.] About two weeks ago, I received an email from one of the editors of the Science Insider blog. He began: “You’ve probably heard that your NSF grant to study the [Chinese] melamine poisoning scandal was targeted at two House science committee hearings yesterday.” I hadn’t heard [...]
Yes, The AAA’s new ‘open access’ ‘journal’ is just as disappointing as everyone thought it would be
When the American Anthropological Association announced that it would create an ‘open access’ ‘journal’, most people in the anthropology’s public sphere were skeptical. Now that it has launched, Open Anthropology turns out to be just as disappointing as everyone thought it would be. Remember the brand disaster’s of MySpace’s failed logo or UPS’s vaguely fecal “What [...]
Celebrate the Sol Tax Action Anthropology Legacy for only Four Dollars Today!!!
For the price of a ridiculously fancy cup of coffee (or a cup of coffee in Sydney) a digital copy of Action Anthropology and Sol Tax in 2012: The Final Word? can be your from amazon or other fine online book sellers. The book represents the perfect storm of applied/activist anthropology and open access in one package: Tax’s version of action anthropology [...]
Against Signposting
One of the main techniques by which writers create drama is by withholding information from readers. Unfortunately, it is difficult to use this technique in academic writing due to the nature of the peer review process. I frequently deal with reviewers who demand more “signposting.” They want everything to be revealed up front. No surprises. [...]
Become an Expert in Less Than an Hour
As a professor of anthropology one frequently has to advise graduate students whose work is, in some key aspects, far removed from one’s own area of expertise. It makes sense that a graduate student interested in child labor in India would want to work with me. I’ve published on India and teach a course on [...]
Go read my review of “World Until Yesterday” at The Appendix
This announcement went out yesterday over social media, but I wanted to blog it here just to make sure as many eyeballs as possible saw it: my review of World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond is now available at The Appendix. The Appendix is an interesting new magazine with a lot of energy behind it, so give [...]
You Too Can Have Mixed Results with Blackboard
Every semester I switch up my Introduction to Anthropology class a little. The big change this spring was that all the graded assignments were online. I tried this through a couple of different methods, one of which was Blackboard test course tool. It is relatively easy to figure things out on your own on Blackboard [...]
Stephen Wertheim reviews Diamond in The Nation
Another long review of World Until Yesterday appeared in The Nation this week. This one is written by Stephen Wertheim, a graduate student at Columbia (the review is available on his website). Like Ira Bashkow, Wertheim is also critical of Diamond, most notably for the ethnocentrism of his point of view. Show More Summary
Update: There was no change of heart (open access + a little satire)
I know this is a while after the fact, but I just wanted to make something very, very clear. The last post I wrote about open access, in which I supposedly had a “change of heart,” was 100 percent complete, absolute balderdash. It was satire. A joke. For April Fool’s Day. I realize that I [...]
Dove Ideology
The latest Dove advertising campaign, “Real Beauty Sketches,” has already garnered its share of well-deserved criticism: That “Dove is owned by Unilever – the same company that owns Axe, king of misogynistic ads.” That “the real take-away is still that women should care whether a stranger thinks she is beautiful.” That the women in the [...]
anthropology, race & racism III: oops, wrong guy edition
I have three links for you: 1. The Saudi marathon man: What made them suspect him? He was running—so was everyone. The police reportedly thought he smelled like explosives; his wounds might have suggested why. He said something about thinking there would be a second bomb—as there was, and often is, to target responders. If [...]
Writing about Bad, Sad, Hard Things
Writing is not always easy. Sometimes the writing flows and sometimes it doesn’t. But writing about things that are emotionally weighty, heavy, and disturbing is a different kind of not easy. Monday morning I wrote a political asylum report for a victim of political violence in Nepal. Monday afternoon, bombs exploded near the Boston marathon [...]
The Paradox of Publicity
(I’ve been thinking about this issue for a while but recently talked about it with my colleagues in the anthro department here at UH Manoa who really added a lot, so thanks to them for that!) When David Weinberger wrote that the Internet was “a world of first drafts”, he wasn’t specifically thinking about academic [...]
When “culture” erases history
Sure, sometimes “culture” can tell us a lot about human behavior and differences. But there are also times when arguments based upon the concept of culture can obscure just as much as they reveal. Right now I am in the middle of going through all of my interviews, making notes, and looking for themes I [...]