iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Ah yup, probably guilty of this, and an excellent reminder. This is also a major reason why anthropology can struggle to be heard outside of anthropology--the people we hope to influence can't read it! conradkottak.substack.com/p/when-anthr...

conradkottak.substack.com

When Anthropology Makes Itself Hard to Read

What happens when anthropological ideas become harder to understand than they need to be? I compared 15 published abstracts from American Anthropologist with one rejected manuscript, judging clarity, ...

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

This comparison seems spurious? I'd liken AI more to electricity or the Internet. Dangerous and useful; leeching and transformative; cultivating creativity and toxicity, injustice and flourishing. Which way it goes reflects the users rather than the tool.

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Imagine how academia would change if our workload audits counted how many books we’d read that year instead of how many we’d written #academia

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I literally couldn't create a Gmail email address today. But convoluted layers of complexity, errors, until I hit a wall and the help section's solution was to USE A FRIEND'S PHONE. They have all our money, so why is all the tech so bad? #tech

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Omg creating a new gmail account has become literally impossible. I just need a burner email account I can use to register for something else. Where does one get one of these in this day and age?

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Survivor producers: “There is no winner's edit" Also Survivor producers: “We want you to understand why the first person got voted out, and why the person who wins, wins.” That’s literally how you produce a winner’s edit, my dudes. #Survivor50 www.goldderby.com/tv/2026/surv...

goldderby.com

‘Survivor’ team shuts down ‘winner’s edit’ theory as Jeff Probst hints Tiffany Ervin will play again one day

Season 50 of the reality TV show is nominated for five Emmy Awards.

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

I really appreciate how the ancient Egyptians didn’t take cats for granted.

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

To balance my perspective: what is something that has improved under late capitalism?

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

*Takes glasses off* "I must remember where I put these"

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Illustrating how far US research norms are diverging - all Research Ireland grant applications require a statement on how sex and gender issues are being addressed in the research.

Sex and Gender Dimension in Research Statement (max. 1000 words)
In accordance with the Research Ireland External Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Strategy 2023-2028,10 all Applicants must complete a statement articulating the consideration of biological sex and/or social gender variables in their planned research. Please consult the Guidance for Applicants on Ethical and Scientific Issues9 and Section 5.4 of the Call Document for resources on how to address the sex and/or gender dimension of research in your grant.

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

I tried organising my feedback comments bank into tabs in Google docs and feel quite pleased with this system innovation (yes I will spend hours designing ways to optimise marking to procrastinate actually marking)

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Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group @acyig.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

ACYIG 2024-2025 BOOK PRIZE ANNOUNCEMENT The 2024-2025 ACYIG Book Prize Committee has chosen Dr. Shannon Ward’s book Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau (University of Toronto Press) as our Book Prize Winner. 1/3

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

Proud to share this article by our @uniofgalway.bsky.social Children's Studies student Leanne Keohane! "The gap between media panic and the lived reality of children on Roblox is striking." www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

irishexaminer.com

The real risk of online harm is not Roblox — it's our fear of children's agency

Children are humans capable of navigating the world, as long as we give them the right supports

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

If you can set aside the category violation, I reckon this actually sounds amazing

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Sharing some delicious student comics from my course "Comics, Childhood and the Alternative." This one is about the experience of ADHD, by the creative phenom Ellie Bradley.

A hand-drawn illustration of a person with messy hair in a bun, surrounded by scribbles, with the text "WELCOME TO A STORY ABOUT MY BRAIN" at the top.

A person wakes up surrounded by colorful creature-like drawings, talks to them, gets out of bed, and is later seen choosing clothes while the creatures interact around the room

Comic strip of a boy named Alex encountering colorful characters while trying to get dressed. Each character represents distractions. Alex's frustration grows as he falls behind schedule.

A frustrated person in a kitchen surrounded by chaos. A red devilish figure suggests making "fancy bread." The person, overwhelmed, covers their face, thinking, "I should’ve stayed in bed."

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

The gymnastics sports podcast I follow has some seriously impressive newsletters @gymcastic.com

What We’re Talking About
On April 28, 1967 (the year of the goat) Muhammad Ali refused to step forward when his name was called in the military draft to serve in Vietnam. He famously said, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” In the prime of his career (25-28 years old) he was immediately stripped of his heavyweight title and was suspended from competition. In June of that year Ali was convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. He remained free on appeal and in 1971 his case was heard in front of the Supreme Court (Clay v. United States) where his conviction was unanimously overturned. Seven years after he was stripped of his title Ali beat George Foreman in the famed Rumble in the Jungle.

Muhammad Ali isn’t the greatest of all time because he has the best boxing record. In fact, during his comeback from exile he lost two of his four matches. What transformed him from a champion to a legend—and global icon—required courage and sacrifice. Ali stood for something and it cost him. At the time, it’s estimated that only 11% of Americans supported his decision. It’s safe to say he was hated. He was willing to sacrifice his reputation, millions of dollars, the prime of his career and even his own freedom for a justice he believed was being denied. This, of course, sparked others to find courage, including the famous raised fists by Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the 1968 Olympics.

Once again we are living through tumultuous and terrifying times where basic human rights are being denied and our neighbors are being kidnapped and even murdered. I recognize that it’s unfair to ask or even wish for this, but the moment is once again ripe for a champion to become a legend. And it needs to be asked what good is a large platform if those who control …

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

"We are not unemployed because we are unemployable. We are unemployed because we are the first to buckle under exploitation."

kaiblackwood.substack.com

The Hidden Reason So Many Autistic Adults Can’t Stay Employed

The Cost of Asking One Person to Do the Work of Five

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

Pluribus is an intense ontological experience for Christmas break

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

Win for political enfranchisement of the young! I teach university students and they don’t know this stuff because our society’s ideologies of childhood and youth prevent us from making the political system universally accessible

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Micah @rincewind.run · 25/12/2025

Discworld QOTD, from Hogfather

All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

It’s hard for many people to learn that things aren’t real. It’s a big worldview shift that can be really triggering and destabilising, overturn identities, undermine cultural sources of moral authority and advice. You can see the barriers preventing that one small epistemic step for man.

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Terre-Strial @terre-strial.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

“The longer I live, the more convinced I am that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.” - George Bernard Shaw

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Is it just me realising like humanity is way way worse than I was led to believe

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Sean Jones KC @seanjones.org · 11/12/2025

White men, imagine you go for a job. The interview panel is three black women. The board of directors is all black women and has been, without exception, forever. You notice that all supervisors are black women and the only white man you see is cleaning. The company insists they appoint on merit /1

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

“Anyone who’s ever found a blunt “no” scrawled in the margin of an essay knows that universities force humility upon us.… you realise how much of yourself is inherited or assumed and how freeing it is to rebuild that self from first principles.” thespinoff.co.nz/society/10-1...

thespinoff.co.nz

We’ve forgotten what universities are for

With New Zealand universities facing not only a funding crisis but a philosophical challenge to their role, the soul of tertiary education is at stake.

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Frustrating example of #epistemicmirecognition: rejection (after 2 rounds of review and reviewers recommending acceptance) from journal editor because this autoethnographic paper sounds like a story retrospectively told from my experiences (and so cannot be "academically rigorous inquiry"). Sigh.

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

“In the Kalahari, one little boy who would almost certainly be diagnosed with autism in an American doctor’s office is highly valued for his abilities… the boy, his father told me, “is great herding goats. He always knows where they are in the day or night.”” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | Autism Has Always Existed. We Haven’t Always Called It Autism.

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

This is a super helpful and interesting window into the editorial process - I learned a lot! I found the explanation of the relationship between editor and reviewer reports in final decision-making especially helpful to understand.

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

I was a grad student when Trump got elected in 2016, and the next day a very senior professor commented: "just goes to show the dangers of an uneducated populace." I have always remembered that remark over the last few years of social and political regression. Lest we forget what education is for.

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Harry Shier @harryshier.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

A valuable checklist. Thanks Julie. And for those seeking to explore further and challenge adultism in research, can I offer some additional resources from my own back catalogue: www.harryshier.net/docs/Shier-A... www.harryshier.net/docs/Shier-W...

harryshier.net

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

It's hard to see what we're not seeing when working from the dominant or majority (normative) social position. As researchers, we share a normative but rarely critically considered position as ADULTS. This means our research has likely been shaped by adult-centrism. I made a resource.

I consider my research ageless
Most or all of my participants are working-age adults
I consider research about children, youth or older-age people to be the subject of special niche scholarship, not mainstream to my discipline. I expect research involving children, youth or older-age people to be separate subfields.

Age variation within the adult age category is not part of my analysis
I do not specify the age or life stage of my participants when contextualising their stories or quotes
I don’t really consider how the perspectives of children, adolescents or older-age people might change my interpretations of adult participants’ experiences in my research

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George Takei @georgetakei.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

When I was little, the U.S. military came to our home at gunpoint and took me and my family away. We were imprisoned for years in barbed wire camps simply because we were Japanese American. I have spent my life telling that story, hoping it would never be repeated.

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

Watching the US from afar, you realise the frog did notice the water heating up, it just believed the next midterm would turn off the stove.

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Katy Montgomerie 🦗 @katymontgomerie.com · 15/07/2025

Ireland has had "sELf iD" for 10 years now and not one single issue that the media, government and anti-trans movement predicted has come to pass. Not one. If it works in Ireland why would it not work here? No one who opposes it can give a good answer, because the real answer is transphobia

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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 08/07/2025

BREAKING: Scientists are staging a “science fair” in the lobby of a Congressional building to tell elected officials about the critical knowledge the US will lose because their research grants have been canceled.

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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

IDF soldiers have now themselves admitted they have been ordered to murder aid-seekers in Gaza. Truly an atrocity built on atrocity. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

'It's a Killing Field': IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid
IDF officers and soldiers told Haaretz they were ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near food distribution sites in Gaza, even when no threat was present. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, prompting the military prosecution to call for a review into possible war crimes

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

"What do other disciplines have to say about anthropology?" I asked ChatGPT... how accurate are these vibes? chatgpt.com/share/68584c... #epistemicrecognition #interdisciplinarity #STS #anthropology #academia

1. Sociology
Overlap & Rivalry: Sociology and anthropology have long had a sibling rivalry. Sociologists have sometimes viewed anthropology as less rigorous or overly focused on "exotic" cultures.

Critiques: Especially in the mid-20th century, sociologists critiqued anthropology for lacking quantitative methods or generalizability.

Admiration: At the same time, many sociologists admire anthropology’s deep ethnographic insight and theoretical richness — especially in areas like symbolic interactionism, cultural sociology, and the sociology of knowledge.

2. History
Turn to Anthropology: In the 1970s and 80s, historians (especially cultural historians and those influenced by the “linguistic turn”) were heavily influenced by anthropologists like Clifford Geertz.

Mutual Enrichment: Historians appreciate anthropology’s attention to meaning, symbols, and context. Anthropological approaches helped redefine historical narratives about colonialism, race, and everyday life.

Critique: Some historians remain wary of presentism or interpretive leaps in anthropological work, especially when anthropologists use theory in ways that downplay archival evidence.

3. Political Science
Limited Uptake: Mainstream political science has often ignored anthropology due to its qualitative methods and contextual specificity.

Critical Political Science: However, critical scholars (especially in political theory, postcolonial studies, and development studies) use anthropological insights to critique the state, neoliberalism, and global governance.

Anthropology of the State: Work by anthropologists like James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta has influenced more nuanced understandings of power, bureaucracy, and development.

4. Economics
Mainstream Dismissal: Economists have traditionally seen anthropology as anecdotal or unscientific, due to its rejection of models, quantification, and predictive power.

Growing Interest: Some heterodox economists and behavioral economists are increasingly interested in anthropological work, particularly on informal economies, gift exchange, and non-market values.

Ethnographic Challenge: Economic anthropologists like David Graeber have explicitly critiqued economic theory from an anthropological angle, often with sharp effect.

5. Psychology
Cultural Psychology: This subfield is strongly influenced by anthropology, especially work on enculturation, emotion, and child development.

Tensions: Some psychologists criticize anthropology’s lack of replicability or hypothesis testing.

Shared Concerns: Both disciplines grapple with questions of universality vs. cultural specificity in human behavior.

6. Philosophy
Anthropology of Ethics: Philosophers (especially moral and political philosophers) have increasingly looked to anthropological work on ethics, relativism, and moral reasoning.

Anthropological Challenge: Philosophers sometimes find anthropological relativism threatening to normative arguments.

Interest in Practice: Some branches of philosophy (e.g. ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology) find resonance with anthropology’s attention to lived experience and social meaning.

7. Literary & Cultural Studies
Highly Engaged: These fields have been profoundly influenced by anthropology — especially structuralism, post-structuralism, and symbolic anthropology.

Mutual Exchange: Figures like Lévi-Strauss, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and later Clifford Geertz are frequently cited.

Criticism: Some scholars accuse anthropology of exoticism or insufficient self-reflexivity, although this is also a concern internal to anthropology itself.

8. Science and Technology Studies (STS)
Enthusiastic Dialogue: STS and anthropology have a strong and evolving relationship, particularly around ethnographies of science, laboratory life, and knowledge production.

Anthropologists in STS: Many STS scholars (e.g. Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol) use ethnographic and anthropological methods extensively.

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

Welp, humanity, we had a good run

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Jean Hunleth @jeanhunleth.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

I’m excited about my latest publication with Sienna Ruiz in Medical Anthropology Theory Against Image Positivism: the possibilities of play as a mode of health research. Check it out and then check out the GIFs of images in the pdf (comments below) www.medanthrotheory.org/mat/article/...

medanthrotheory.org

View of Against Image Positivism: The Potentials for Play as a Mode of Health Research

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 19/06/2025

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

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Cindy Michels 🇺🇲🇪🇺🇨🇦 @cindymichels.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

#KateNash does it again in #BrassEye Parady mocking UK TERFs 😂⤵️

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Julie Spray @juliespray.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

I have to give credit to the algorithms: my Bluesky feed is a beautiful thing

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Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group @acyig.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

The ACYIG is delighted to present our latest Spotlight on Scholarship, featuring Chris Chapman's work on how children make stories and lives in residential care institutions in Japan: acyig.americananthro.org/spotlight-on...

In principle, child protection services aim to safeguard children’s health and well-being. Yet, interventions may often involve a paradoxical practice: child-family separation. Removing a child from an unsafe environment makes sense in the eyes of authorities, but in a relational sense, it is children whose social lives are displaced and remade. Children are blameless, yet they are the ones to be separated from their home and community. This context offers an insightful space to learn about and appreciate personhood, care, and welfare state politics.

In Japan, the use of residential care institutions is relatively high and a staple of the child protection system. In Yusuke’s Story, I chart my encounters with a young person living in group care, Yusuke, and how their journey through the social protection system indexes how displacement, resocialization, and normativity come together to create a complicated political subjectivity.

Yusuke took me on a virtual tour of his childhood in urban Tokyo through Google Maps, illustrated in the above picture. I learned about his old friends, vivid memories of 3/11, and his family. He also introduced me to his secret hobby: writing short stories. He wrote one for me—a slice-of-life tale about a young person living in state care. It was in little moments of listening and being there, side by side, that I came to understand how being in state care was more than place. Being in care was about making new relationships, making sense of complex feelings, facing inequality, reframing old memories, and losing one’s sense of belonging. These insights, in turn, reshaped my ethnographic methods and writing.

Yusuke’s Story is a collection of multiple, non-linear narratives on subjectivity: Yusuke’s commentary on everyday life in care, the short story as text, Yusuke’s biography, and my attempt to portray these accounts for you. All in all, this story is a partial one that speaks to a particular moment while shedding light on the nuanced …

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Tze Ming Mok 莫志明 @tzemingdynasty.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

You know why this is a load of shit? Scrapping DEI requirements isn't about 'merit' vs 'diversity', the key PSC guidance is focused on eliminating bias from recruitment & progression so your hiring is *actually merit-based and not racist*.

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