Category Archives: Main Story

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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ethnoGRAPHIC: Extending Anthropology’s Reach, One Comic at a Time

Part of my job as an editor is to convince people to write the books I think they should write, not necessarily the ones they want to write. I’ve had some success doing so, even in the face of laughter, eye rolling, and outright rejection. In fact, some of the best books I have published came from authors who had originally put up the most resistance to my pitch. So perhaps it’s not surprising that I thought I could launch a new book series based on what some might call a wacky idea, without an academic series editor, and with no projects in hand. read more…

  • dateNovember 1, 2017
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  • posted byAnne
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Coding Culture IV: Code-phobia and Making the Most of Fear, Failure, and Tiny Victories in Digital Anthropology

This is the fourth and final post in a multi-part blog series in which Katherine Cook shares her experiences integrating digital anthropology into her teaching. This this post, she explores the fear that technology can induce in both students and instructors, and discusses how failure can be turned into a powerful pedagogy. read more…

  • dateAugust 7, 2017
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  • posted byKatherine Cook
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