Choosing Your Own Adventure: My Life as a Teenage Dungeon Master and How It Prepared Me to Become an Anthropologist

In many ways, Dungeon Masters are the ethnographers of their own worlds. Granted, we’re not exactly interviewing the people who populate them, and we’re inventing most of the traditions and customs out of the content in our own imaginations. But when it comes to building a narrative about people and their ways-of-being, there isn’t all that much difference between narratives of “a” world and narratives of “the” world. This is something we actually have in common with fiction writers as well. Ethnographies share, to an extent, certain characteristics of novels; such that both the author and the anthropologist are setting out to involve their readers in a particular time and place, with a particular group of people (set up as pseudonymous dramatis personae), all who will hopefully tell us something about ourselves in the end.

Ep. #51: Newsworthy stories, Becoming projects, Ethics of danger & Balancing values: This month on TFS

Jodie [1:26] begins our panel this month with a recent incident in Canberra, Australia, where a woman was shot by a 'random' gunman. Luckily her wound was not life-threatening. This story was HUGE here, but at the same time the story was released, Australia was (and currently still is in some places) on fire. Jodie … Continue reading Ep. #51: Newsworthy stories, Becoming projects, Ethics of danger & Balancing values: This month on TFS

Ep. #24 Learning in disaster: Kim Fortun talks STS, knowledge politics & anthropology’s role in a crisis

“We need to be experimental because we’re not up to the task at hand; there’s a real practical and ethical call to responsibility, that drives that experimental commitment.” Kim Fortun, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, author of ‘Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New World Orders’ which won the 2003 Sharon Stephens … Continue reading Ep. #24 Learning in disaster: Kim Fortun talks STS, knowledge politics & anthropology’s role in a crisis

Ep. #21 Misogyny, irrational politics, the ontological turn, and multi-media learning: this month on TFS

Jodie (1:04), drawing on the book Down Girl by Australian philosopher Kate Manne, starts us off by asking what misogyny is, and how we should tackle it as a culture. “If our goal is behaviour change, for bigots to stop being bigots, racists to stop being racists, misogynists to stop being misogynists… is the approach … Continue reading Ep. #21 Misogyny, irrational politics, the ontological turn, and multi-media learning: this month on TFS