A collection from the field and from graduate school. This includes field notes, links published articles, semi-polished seminar papers, and syllabi.
AI Anthropology and history Berlin Blockchain Corporate Culture Cybernetics Driverless Cars LGBTQ linguistic-anthropology machine-learning Media theory NFTs Peer Reviewed Published San Francisco Syllabi Wall Street
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Teaching with AI When I tell people (especially academics) that I research AI, they often ask about classroom uses of AI. The questions are anxious ones. Will students lose access to reliable information? Will they forget how to write? Can teachers retain control over pedagogy? Will teaching jobs disappear? When it comes to the present […]
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As we interact with new kinds of technical systems, knowledge we had always taken for granted may no longer go without saying. In other words, new kinds of knowledge might come to be called common sense. As a result, trying to teach common sense to machines before they enter the world will inevitably fall short.
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Berlin’s NFT projects and events remind us that the users of blockchain, like users of any digital technology, are embodied, emplaced, and encultured beings whose lives extend beyond the immediate site of technological interaction. By extension, the affordances of the technologies they use take on particular meanings and values in local context. In Berlin, one key function of NFTs, the function of authentication, becomes a means for preserving the city’s authenticity amid the perceived disappearance of its ethos.
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Whereas it was once noise, meteorological data became signal when lone cars developed into fleets. This post describes how driverless car developers are turning this signal into value as meteorological surplus.
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This post compares driverless cars’ classification systems to centuries-old cloud atlases. Despite filtering clouds from their road perceptions, driverless cars still sense the road atmospherically–that is, according to the same manner as meteorologists read the clouds.
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To solve for weather, driverless car developers design systems to manage rain, fog, and snow. Their systems filter these weather conditions from data collected by the cars’ sensors, rendering them invisible in the cars’ models of the world. However, there is more to solving for weather than mere data manipulation. Though filtered from the cars’ world models, weather leaves lasting imprints on the cars’ material design and modes of perception.
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How can a discipline preoccupied with the ‘savage slot’ and the ‘suffering slot’ turn its attention to those with the most power in a given society or community? How has the study of elites required anthropologists and ethnographers elsewhere to challenge and reconfigure taken-for-granted methods? What have ethnographers learned about elites and the role elites play in the most pressing social processes of our time? And finally, what can attempts to study up teach us about studying in any direction? This semester, we will pursue such questions.
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This peer-reviewed article was published in Anthropology of Work Review. It examines the project of US corporate diversity and inclusion as it is experienced by LGBTQ-identified employees on Wall Street. It draws on ethnographic research among junior bankers who participate in Wall Street’s LGBTQ recruitment events and employee networks. Attending to their claims that queer […]
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By tracking the emergence, elaboration, and anthropological sources of the corporate culture concept in best-selling texts, this paper demonstrates how economic downturn, competition, and the turn to flexibility all enabled certain strands of anthropological theory to resonate with concerns of corporate managers during this period. Sampling from anthropological theories influenced by cybernetics and systems theory as well as older structural-functionalism, management researchers and consultants developed and popularized a management approach preoccupied with complex systems, information flows, decentralization, and homeostasis.
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What kind of scarcity can coexist with reproducibility? And how does it continue to serve as a source of value? This paper draws from the information theory and cryptography of Claude Shannon as well as the theories and histories of art by Walter Benjamin and Carlo Ginzburg. It demonstrates how, using cryptography, NFTs employ blockchain as a second channel of artistic mediation. They develop a workaround to the problem of mechanical reproduction, allowing the artwork to circulate freely on the web while enclosing its metadata on the blockchain. To do so, and to…
Spencer Kaplan 