AI has widened the liminal space of unemployment, and the “limitless” capability of AI job-seeking tools has also exploded. This all felt like putting out a fire with a bucket of fire—and finding my w...

Digital tools, such as WhatsApp, have offered methodological opportunities for connection, data collection, and the democratization of knowledge production, in part because they are easily accessible ...

Delivery workers do not merely use communication platforms; they inhabit and transform them into sociotechnical infrastructures of collective life. Through these arrangements, knowledge, social relati...

To what extent do measurements from an electroencephalography headset provide evidence of the aesthetic contemplation state of the person wearing it? In the 2015 neuroaesthetic research project Actio...

In Mexico, quelites refers to uncultivated edible plants. The word has a Nahuatl origin derived from kilitl, a term referring to these edible weeds. The earliest dictionaries of colonial Mexico transl...

Anthropologists have long framed studying up as a problem of access: how to get inside institutions that do not want us (Nader 1972; Souleles 2018). My problem was different. Having spent time doing b...

In this piece, Sridhar explores siltation, and its role in coast-making - not as a natural phenomenon but as an agent of history. The physical coast is thus recast as historically produced through thi...

Chinese romance games are built to make players feel heard, and the studios behind them promise the same. Drawing on fieldwork among players of China's female-oriented mobile games, this piece follows...

Researchers are increasingly applying collaborative and participatory approaches to work with and not on gig workers, union organizers, and platform cooperatives. In the last post of our series, we aim to contribute to these practices of actively building alternatives and strengthening movements, by speaking to three gig worker-organizers from India - Manju Goel, Abdul Nayeem, and Javed. We ask them, how do they view the role of researchers in the gig worker organizing landscape? How can researchers best support gig worker unions? What should we keep in mind when embarking on such collaborations?

Researchers are increasingly applying collaborative and participatory approaches to work with and not on gig workers, union organizers, and platform cooperatives. In the last post of our series, we aim to contribute to these practices of actively building alternatives and strengthening movements, by speaking to three gig worker-organizers from India - Manju Goel, Abdul Nayeem, and Javed. We ask them, how do they view the role of researchers in the gig worker organizing landscape? How can researchers best support gig worker unions? What should we keep in mind when embarking on such collaborations?

The post examines the utility of the term

When a video game development company creates a skin, a character, or a bundle of digital items, it is not merely producing aesthetics or playable experiences—it is also building an entire economic sy...

In this third addition to our series on stuckness, Martin Oliver and Jade Vu Henry suggest that the question of what emerges in the wake of getting stuck can also be a generative opening for scholarly...

As biology molecularizes and digitalizes, the materiality of samples and sampler’s labor recedes from view. We are encouraged to imagine microbiome science as a fundamentally informatic practice—a mat...

Anthropology is widely recognized as a fragmented, precarious discipline: short‑term contracts, insecure funding, and the pressure to publish threaten sustained, accountable work with communities. At ...