The Techniques

In the first post on the Ethnographic Clinic, I described the process of writing up an initial ethnographic case; in this post, I discuss what to do next, given the solicitation of responses from the previous stage. Here, I offer a method for fleshing out a case by writing forwards and backwards with the contextual cues produced in the presentation of the case to an audience. The primary…

Ethnographic writing is composed of cases. Ethnographers don’t always think that way about their research, but what they are collecting are descriptions of events, processes, and interactions; interviews with individuals or conversations with groups; and reflections on experiences based on participant-observation. Cases can be singular, e.g., a specific, one-off event, or processual, e.g., a…

You can now download an eBook that includes all of the six steps to preparing an academic article manuscript blog entries, several pieces on peer review and manuscript revision, and a few posts on converting a dissertation into a book manuscript! Maybe the era of the blog is officially over? And, if so, I’ll put together the content from this blog into a series of thematic eBooks. In the…

Academics have been complaining about the for-profit models of publishers like Elsevier, Sage, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Springer since I started my career as a graduate student in the early 2000s; it’s one of the reasons why my cohort of graduate students started an Open Access journal, reconstruction, in 2001! It’s a drag that they generate as much profit as they do off of the “free” labor…

Let’s get this out of the way: Vince McMahon is a terrible person. But, the Vince McMahon Glowing Eyes meme is really excellent. You probably know it and know that it builds from a modest claim to a more exciting one to even more exciting ones, leading to McMahon’s Glowing Eyes. In 2022, I was on the job market and decided it was time to take a very different rhetorical approach to my job…

I recently ran a dissertation writing workshop for the Society for Cultural Anthropology–and, if you missed it, you can play along at home. The workshop was basically group therapy, and I took turns asking participants the following questions. You can answer each of the questions and compare answers with friends (and maybe with members of your dissertation committee!). Why are you writing a…

As summer comes to a close--and I work through writing several peer reviews--I've compiled some of my most frequent suggestions to authors in case they're useful for other people.

The end of summer always brings a flurry of peer review, as I work through all of the submissions and resubmissions that editors sent to me over summer break. I often find myself making similar suggestions to authors and thought that compiling them might serve as a resource for article and book authors to work through before they submit something for peer review. This is a little geared toward…

I've put all of my answers to this summer's "Ask a Journal Author" columns into one place so that you can read them as they were originally written.

Early in 2021, Ilana Gershon asked me to participate in a series of “Ask a Journal Author” columns for Anthropology News. I’m reproducing my answers here in the form that they originally appeared (as opposed to broken into a series of topical posts) in the “interview” because: 1) it’s like an actual conversation, 2) having them in one place makes it a little easier to read, and 3) the sequence of…

Your Dissertation is not Your First Book

Recently a friend wrote to tell me that my earlier two posts about the process of getting your dissertation published as a book really didn’t help answer the most critical question: how do you decide what to keep from the dissertation in the book? I’m chagrined at the oversight. The answer is a difficult one–so bear with my personal narration. I think I turned in a perfectly serviceable…

How I Revise Articles for Resubmission

A fan of printed out pages that include peer reviews for a recent article. It includes marginalia and highlighting from me. The pages are upside down, just to make reading them a little more difficult. This fall, I had a piece come out in Feminist Anthropology. “Recomposing Kinship” is my attempt to get anthropologists (and others) to take technology more seriously as a social actor–or at least…

10* Experiments with World-Building (that aren’t Ursula LeGuin)

One of the first books I read that really impressed on me what the powers of world-building could be was Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. As a rough analogy to Haldeman’s experience in the Vietnam War, the novel depicts a near-future in which a distant, interplanetary war is unfolding. Earth soldiers are shipped to the front through space travel, but due to the effects of relativity, when they…

Can We Have a New Emotion?

Recently, working through a series of memoirs of assisted suicide, I began to wonder if the kinds of emotions that Americans have available to them are sufficient to think through the ethical decisions that we face on a changing planet, in a changing society, and across tumultuous life courses. Do we have the language — as individuals, as a society — to describe the kinds of feelings that we’re…

Facilitation as a Kind of Care

Recently, there have emerged intense debates about Facilitated Communication (FC). Narrowly defined, FC is the process whereby an individual with a communication impairment relies on another individual’s aid in the use of a keyboard, letter board, symbol board, or tablet device with a symbolic interface. The facilitator uses his or her hand to steady the arm or hand of the communicator, making it…

I'm starting a series of previews of some of the ideas in a new book that's coming out this winter. Here's the first: The Language of Anti-Reductivism. #disability #neuroscience #anthropology

Red Root and Running Cold — two sculptures from Nancy Bowen. Each is made of glass and metal, and loosely mimics a human body (or maybe the nervous system). See more of her work at http://nancybowenstudio.com/.

One of my ongoing projects is to develop a language of anti-reductivism. It’s a project that I share with a number of social scientists and humanities scholars, and has been motivated…

Everything I Needed to Unlearn I Learned from Sid Meier's Civilization (in which I work through a popular video game and all of the bad social theory that underpins it. Well, maybe not *all* the bas social theory...)

I’ve been playing Sid Meier’s Civilizationmy whole video-game-playing life. If you don’t know it, it’s a slow strategy game that models the origins of “civilization” through the near future. Players choose a “civilization” to play (what anthropologists of an earlier era might refer to as a “culture group”) and take turns conducting research, moving units around to explore the randomly-generated…

We're Having a Generational Transition Problem... (in which I consider how academics might manage the inevitable generational transfer of power).

That’s Luke and Yoda, from “The Last Jedi,” watching the original Jedi temple burn to the ground. My apologies if that’s a spoiler in any way.

There was a moment when a senior faculty member and I were talking in a shared departmental office — just catching up really. The faculty member was talking about their daughter, who recently had a child, started a career, got married, and bought a…

Faculty mentoring of graduate students is one of those things that is rightly the subject of recurrent conversation; there are good mentors and bad, lack of clarity in faculty expectations and student responses, sustainable and deeply-broken models of graduate student training, all of which seem to perpetuate themselves (often unreflexively). The faculty who are best at mentoring recognize that…