Adventures in Blogging: Bringing Anthropology to the World

For World Anthropology Day, we asked Paul Stoller to share his thoughts on the urgent need for a more public anthropology, as well as his ideas about blogging as one particular way to reach that public. Paul’s forthcoming book, Adventures in Blogging: Public Anthropology and Popular Media, will be available in April. read more…

  • dateFebruary 15, 2018
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  • posted byAnne
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Five Years of Teaching Culture

Five years ago this fall we launched an experiment. As an editor at a university press, with an interest in ethnographic methods and a mandate for publishing teaching-oriented texts, I wanted to connect with a community of people that wasn’t always easy to find. That community included anthropologists who wanted to think through their research differently and publish for a broader audience, as well as those who were particularly interested in finding new ways to engage their students. We decided we would start a blog: Teaching Culture, after the name of our teaching-oriented ethnography series. read more…

  • dateDecember 21, 2017
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  • posted byAnne
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Making #AmAnth17 Manageable: The Teaching Culture Top 30

What would the AAA be without the Teaching Culture Top 30 list? Every year we scour the AAA program and try to winnow it down to a short list of recommended sessions. We acknowledge it’s an almost impossible task, and only ever a partial list, but we attempt it anyway. As usual, there are a good number of recommended sessions that deal with teaching. That is our mandate after all. But in honor of the publication of our first ethnoGRAPHIC novel, we are also turning the spotlight on sessions that expand the possibilities for ethnography to work in a variety of multi-modal formats. read more…

  • dateNovember 22, 2017
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  • posted byAnne
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Q&A: On Illustration, Collaboration, and Anthropology

This month, we launch our first graphic novel and the first book in our new ethnoGRAPHIC series, Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution. This project is the result of a collaborative effort involving many players, but at the heart of the process is the collaboration between two anthropologists and two artists. In advance of the book’s publication, our editor, Anne Brackenbury, sits down with artists Sarula Bao and Caroline Brewer to discuss their role in the making of Lissa. read more…

  • dateNovember 15, 2017
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  • posted byAnne
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An Advance Student Review of Lissa

Reviews of Lissa, the graphic novel launching our new ethnoGRAPHIC series, will start to appear in the next few weeks, including reviews by academics writing for journals, blogs, and more public venues like The Lancet. But what about the students who are the target audience for this book? How do they respond to the novel, and what is their takeaway? Today we offer an advance review of Lissa from Zenab Youssef, a sophomore at Brown University studying International Relations and Middle Eastern Studies. In a freshman course called “Egypt in Revolution” she read an advance draft of Lissa and produced the following review. We are proud to publish it here. read more…

  • dateNovember 8, 2017
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  • posted byAnna
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