After a legal case to have the speaker of the PNG Parliment’s order to destroy several of the building’s carvings recognized as illegal failed, a group of academics has published a discussion paper entitled “Purging Parliament: A New christian Parliament in Papua New Guinea“. The piece debates whether or notContinue Reading
Haidy Geismar, UCL Anthropology As the incoming co-editor of the Journal of Material Culture, as well as one of the editors here at Material World Blog, I have been involved in many conversations regarding the politics, economics, and materiality of Open Access. It is clear that there is great concernContinue Reading
The computer that you have in front of you right now will die sooner or later. And when it does you will get rid of it, perhaps, if you are well-behaved citizen, in one of the designated recycling drop-offs points your city council has created for technological equipment. That, however, won’t markContinue Reading
Graeme Were, University of Queensland The stores of Queensland museums are laden with ethnographic collections from Papua New Guinea, many of which originate from northern New Ireland. Few people there are able to gain access to these treasures even though New Irelanders hold great interest in learning more about theirContinue Reading
Haidy Geismar, NYU and UCL I was interested to read a very brief, rather parochial, account of the world of anthropology blogging over at the site of Anthropology News, the journal of the American Anthropological Association, . Material World was singled out as an example of a “team blog” butContinue Reading
Danny Miller, UCL Although this site was started as a collaboration between Haidy in New York and Danny in London, from the beginning we were hoping to attract postings from a global interest in this genre of academic work. We do pretty well in this regard, with contributions from academics,Continue Reading
Some time ago I put out a call for papers for our Occasional Paper Series. Indexed by the Library of Congress, this is our attempt to explore the possibilities of thinking about how Material World could also be thought of as an open source, online publication. Since that last call,Continue Reading
Material World is seeking submissions for our new Occasional Paper Series. In this we aim to make available works that are hard to publish in conventional academic environments because they are multi-media, long or short, reports, polemical, or otherwise exploratory, creative and innovative. Our Occasional Paper Series is fully peer-reviewedContinue Reading
The Material Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association is rekindling the exchange of course syllabi (outline of topics, readings, and schedule). The earlier initiative led 10 years ago to a collection representing courses in US universities and published by the Winterthur Museum. It’s time for a new version, withContinue Reading
Today, January 18th, a massive internet strike is being held across the globe to protest the potential passing of the restrictive bill, Stop Online Piracy, or SOPA by US Congress. Check out google or wikipedia’s webpage if you don’t believe us. Material World supports this protest against internet freedom. TheContinue Reading
Daniel Miller, UCL I just wanted to point out a couple of books of interest to material culture studies that otherwise might be missed. The reason they might not appear on the radar is that the in one case they come from a more literary or humanities perspective and THEContinue Reading