With Halloween just days away, October’s roundup will look at some of the macabre and spooky insights the web had to offer this month. Fear being a sensory experience–a pounding heart, shortness of breath, sweaty palms and vision problems are among the physiological markings of fear–it’s no surprise that science, medicine and the media valiantly make attempts each year to …
Author Archives: Emily Goldsher-Diamond
Web Roundup: Organ Transfer in Open Spaces
July’s web roundup will focus on recent conversations around organ transfer and its public perception. Organ transfer, with its complex and oftentimes invisible circuits of body parts, donors, recipients, doctors, markets and the state, is particularly ripe for intervention by social scientists. Ethan Watters’ profile of anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes at Pacific Standard says that her work on organ transfer was, …
Web Roundup: The Body and Big Data
This month’s web roundup will take a brief look at the body in the face of big data. You may have heard that a panel from the recent Theorizing the Web conference held in Brooklyn featured a dynamic talk by sociologist Dr. Janet Vertesi on pregnancy and big data. When Dr. Vertesi found out she was pregnant, she sought …
Web Roundup: Faster Than a Speeding Bullet
Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article, “Man and Superman,” on genetics and performance in sport kicks off this month’s web roundup, where we ask the questions: Who is a superman (or superwoman)? How do we even go about defining the characteristics of a superman? How might we account for subjectivities in the search for superman?
Gladwell cites an array of genetic …
Web Roundup: Prosthetics in Public
Last month Melanie Boeckmann gathered links from around the web dealing with multiple publics—the public image of anthropology, the availability of content to the public, and the place of private behavior in public, just to name a few topics. Melanie’s interest in public leads the way for this month’s web roundup, where I ask: what ideas (and imaginaries) about future …