Can your phone keep you mentally well?
Developments in digital phenotyping have brought new attention to forms of behavioural data collection that capitalise on the apparent ubiquity of mobile phone use and the fact that many people are almost constantly connected to digital devices. A phenotype refers to observable characteristics understood to be shaped by genetics and/or the environment. Digital …
Behind the long counter of Café Dugnad, smells of spices and meat float out of industrial ovens. Light streams in through the glass doors of the smallish café, as loud hip-hop plays through the speakers. All day, someone hands out coffee and juice over the counter, and the café serves around 200 plates of food at lunch and dinner. At …
In 1992 Nancy Munn argued anthropological research should pay more attention to people’s lived realities of time. Since then, we have seen time and temporalities grow into a much-studied topic in anthropology and the broader social sciences, with various research publications (see, for example, Bryant and Knight 2019; Baraitser 2017; Moroşanu and Ringel 2016; Sharma 2014), workshops, and conferences dedicated …
Canada, like most capitalist societies of the global North, faces “an unprecedented and devastating wave of overdoses” and overdose deaths (Wells, 2017), intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic (Government of Canada, 2021). In the summer of 2017, activists including people who use drugs (PWUD), allies, and nurses in Ottawa responded to this wave of overdoses by establishing the city’s first unsanctioned …
The rise of Çatalhöyük is one of my favorite topics to cover in the Introduction to Anthropology course. Located in central Turkey, the proto-urban settlement was occupied for more than a millennium, starting about 9000 years ago. At any given time during Çatalhöyük’s existence, between 3,000 and 8,000 people lived in what is one of the oldest known “towns” in …
The anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo approaches ethnography as not just the depiction of a world but as what addresses and displaces both the writer and the reader, where ethnography itself becomes a site of transformation. Our conversations since 2014, first as she was completing revisions on her book Knot of the Soul and then as I was writing my dissertation, and …