Category: Reading Lists
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Anthropology of Friendship
Susan MacDougallUniversity of Cambridge November 21, 2022 Friendship might be a necessary condition of anthropology. Ethnographic fieldwork relies substantially on friendship: participant observation unfolds through connections between people who share ideas and information, do favors for one another, form close bonds, and make use of one another’s presence. Ethnographic writing also relies on the trope…
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British Coalmining Communities: An Extended Reading List
The convenors are pleased to present this extended reading list alongside a review-essay ‘The Anthropology of Post-Coalonialism. Chima Michael Anyadike-DanesDurham University July 15, 2022 Bostyn, Anne Marie. ‘“Ah Know Whit Like an *oor Is”: The Meaning of Time in a Scottish Lowland Community.’ Doctoral Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1990. ———. ‘The Work Ethic in a…
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Botanical Kinships: A Tangled Taxonomy
Amy Leia McLachlan University of Chicago & Field Museum of Natural History May 16, 2022 Anthropological attention to the vital and varied ways in which human and botanical life make one another is just one among many modes of noticing that have lately coalesced around questions of botanical kinships. Research into plants’ capacities for sensing…
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On Ethnographic Methods
Kathryn Mariner Department of AnthropologyUniversity of Rochester January 25, 2022 In assembling this brief reading list on methodology, I was forced to articulate my specific take (make?) on anthropological—namely ethnographic, as I am an ethnographer—methods, a large and unwieldy, even indefinable, perhaps “unteachable,” field of theory and practice. I recently taught the undergraduate methods course…
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Critical Philosophy of Race
Kimberly Ann Harris Department of PhilosophyMarquette University September 16, 2021 Recent debates on race and the #BlackLivesMatter movement have pushed scholars within the social sciences and humanities to reconsider the contested category of race. Such debates would seem to demand for a more nuanced analysis of current forms of racialization and the experiences of racism.…
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Data, Platforms, and Bias
Johannes Lenhard & Alexandrine Royer Max Planck – Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social ChangeCambridge University April 15, 2021 As digital capitalism, and with it data, algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and platforms are becoming increasingly dominant, the anthropological interest in the topic is slowly growing, too. So far, most of the (critical) engagement with…
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Public Anthropology
Andrea E. Pia Department of AnthropologyLondon School of Economics and Political Science April 1, 2021 What and how does anthropology contribute to public life? Do anthropologists have a responsibility to contribute to those communities beyond the academy that make the study of anthropology possible? What happens when ethnography goes public? And who is the audience…
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The Anthropology of Cinema
Chihab El Khachab Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern StudiesUniversity of Cambridge March 15, 2021 Anthropological interest in film as a medium has historically been centred on ethnographic films, which were the hallmark of visual anthropology as a subfield. Over the past thirty years, however, there has been a noticeable movement in visual (and media)…
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Chronic Present
September 2020 This reading list covers studies within anthropology and cognate disciplines that deal with situations where people are stuck in the present. This is not some warped time loop or hole in the matrix out of a sci-fi flick, though conjuring up such images might be of use to some. As a social scientific…
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Digital ethnography
Heikki Wilenius Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology University of Helsinki August 2020 I’ve had an on-and-off interest in online social phenomena for a while now. I fancied becoming an internet ethnographer during my undergrad days, but finally, my interests veered into other things. However, I’ve always kept at least half an eye on the…