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 Trust Wall Street
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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 