By exploring the rich variety of otaku culture from multiple perspectives, Mimi Ito will provide fascinating insights into the present and future of cultural production and distribution in the digital age.
Podcast: Jennifer Robertson, “Gendering Robots: Posthuman Sexism in Japan”
University of Michigan professor of anthropology Jennifer Robertson explored and interrogated the gendering of humanoid robots manufactured today in Japan for use in the home and workplace.
Podcast: Celia Pearce, “Identity-as-Place: Fictive Ethnicities in Online Games & Virtual Worlds”
Celia Pearce, exploring the connection of identity to virtual place and the “Uru Diaspora,” a game community from the defunct MMOG “Uru: Ages Beyond Myst”.
Podcast: Stefan Helmreich, “Submarine Media: Sounding the Sea with Cyborg Anthropology”
A first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s three-person submersible, Alvin, meditating on the sounds rather that the sights of the dive.
A Ceaseless Becoming: Narratives of Adolescence Across Media
The broad appeal of narratives with adolescent protagonists across a variety of media, including literature, film, and video games.
CMS Graduate Student Films Camera-Cautious Kuna
The result of these dialogues is a cultural representation that challenges an understanding of itself: A fictional work that is also a documentary.
Anthropology of Nostalgia: Primitivism and the Antimodern Vision in the American Southwest, 1880-1930
“Indigenous populations and rural areas become as central to the activities and investments of modernism as urban Western ones.”
