Today’s working journalists are experiencing friction in stereo: both readers and sources don’t trust them to get...
Tag: anthropology
Art & Imagination in Online Qualitative Research: A New Tool for Brand Listening
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was pretty sure I was done. I had been a qualitative researcher and brand consultant for 25 years. I had spent the past decade building my practice around an approach that centered contextual and imaginative face-to-face research. I called it brand listening,...
Theory Instruments as Tangible Ways of Knowing
While ethnographers and the data they produce already play a role in affecting industry practices, there is potential to integrate anthropological ways of seeing and knowing into a shared transdisciplinary...
Design Anthropology and Design Culture: In Pursuit of a Well-Thought World
Learn about new concepts and practices in the evolving intersections of ethnography and design. Overview This talk explores the role of ethnographers when collaborating with designers, and especially about how...
Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life
Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life Gillian Tett 2021, 304 pp, Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster → Watch Simon Roberts in conversation with Gillian Tett & Donna Flynn Ulf Hannerz once proposed that “common sense is cultural ‘business as usual’; standard operating...
Anthro Spectacle @SXSW: How Anthropology Captured the Imagination of Marketing Tech
I live in Austin, Texas. Along with breakfast tacos, Willie Nelson, and scorching hot summers, Austin is the home of the international conference known as South by Southwest (SXSW). It’s actually three conferences (Interactive, Music, and Film) rolled out over ten days in March. Much of the...
Needed: Anthropologists in Insurance
I work in life insurance. No, I’m not an actuary or underwriter—I’m an anthropologist, and it’s a great fit. I began my career working with refugees in the public and nonprofit sectors, then spent seven years teaching anthropology courses to undergraduates, and I’ll admit that insurance wasn’t on...
Reconsidering the Value of Wearables
These days a wide range of new digital products are being lumped together in the much-hyped category ‘Wearables’—heart-monitoring shirts, shoes that monitor muscle fatigue, smart watches of all sorts. What’s new about these products is their digital characteristics, but what's really interesting...
The Anthropology of Wearables: The Self, The Social, and the Autobiographical
A wide range of new digital products lumped together under the category of ‘Wearables’ or ‘Wearable Technology’ raises fundamental questions about the way we think about our individual bodies and the species Homo Sapiens. This paper traces three different relationships to what are called the...
The Rise of the User and the Fall of People: Ethnographic Cooptation and a New Language of Globalization
This paper examines how ethnographic praxis as a means for driving social change via industry, went from a peripheral, experimental field, to a normalized part of innovation and product development – only to be coopted from within by a new language of power. Since the 1980s anthropologists have...