Jessica Knights, Material and Visual Culture MA, UCL Anthropology While undertaking my Master’s in Material and Visual Culture in UCL’s anthropology department last year, I received a Heinz Wolff Materials Bursary to carry out a project at the University’s Institute of Making. My proposal was to explore the propertiesContinue Reading
[By Pete Lockwood, a former MSc Social Anthropology student (2013-14) from UCL] peter.lockwood.13@ucl.ac.uk When I conducted fieldwork in an Essex boxing gym for my MSc dissertation in Social Anthropology over the summer months of 2014, like a lot of other fieldworkers might do, I was reading bits ofContinue Reading
Timothy Carroll, UCL Anthropology Source: http://www.london-attractions.info/trafalgar-square-christmas-tree.htm London’s Trafalgar Square holds a rather central spot in the festival seasons of the city. Early in December, as it has since 1947, it again played host to a towering conifer gifted to the people of Britain by the city of Oslo, Norway, in appreciation for their helpContinue Reading
[This is an invited post from a PhD student working at Oxford University, accompanied by a series of comments about visual methods from PhD students working at UCL] Shireen Walton, PhD candidate in Anthropology, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford shireen.walton@sant.ox.ac.uk Oxford Digital Ethnography Group (OxDEG)/https://www.facebook.com/groups/OXDEG/ Continue Reading
When Philae phoned home to Earth a couple of weeks ago, the world cheered. The European Space Agency (ESA) had achieved an amazing first in space exploration – landing a robotic lander on a comet! A comet! However, the cheers became somewhat subdued within hours of the landing, all becauseContinue Reading
Haidy Geismar, UCL I’ve been working on a paper for a workshop on “Transforming data: drawing otherness into data debates” next week. I will be talking about one of my current research projects, Te Ara Wairua – Pathways of the Intangible. In collaboration with Kura Puke and Stuart Foster ofContinue Reading
Patrick Laviolette (EHI, Tallinn University, hosts of EASA2014) In terms of providing reflections on the material dimensions of place and landscape, here are some links to what I feel have been amongst the more provocative postings on the blog over the years. Many of the authors to the links belowContinue Reading
Christopher Pinney, UCL [Please note: this post was written before the intensification of the current Israeli offensive on Gaza] I decided to transgress the BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions) injunction and attend a conference on ‘The Photographic Imagination’ in Tel Aviv in June 2014 for several reasons. The two central onesContinue Reading
In this post, I link to the very best posts in our archive focused on making, doing and craft. In Fixing, Things, Fixing Ourselves, Lydia Nicholas writes about Suguru, an open source material for extending the life of mass produced (or any other) artifacts. In Plan B for a NuclearContinue Reading
Haidy Geismar, UCL In this new series of summer posts, we, the editors look back at the past 8 or so years that Material world Blog has been going and curate a series of “best of” themed post. Here, I link to what I consider to be some of theContinue Reading
In March, Gabriella Coleman gave a talk at the UCL Centre for Digital Anthropology drawing on her research with the activist (non)collective Anonymous. Her talk, entitled Anonymous and the Craftiness of Craft and the Trickiness of Trickery, linked Anonymous activists to the anthropological archetype of the trickster, and developed theContinue Reading