First Australian Arab Film Festival

I have just received some information about the first national tour of the Arab Film Festival in Australia.  The Festival opens with the Egyptian film, Eye of the Sun, at Dendy Opera Quays Sydney on 1 November.  The Festival contains a program of six films and will tour around Australian cities between 1-29 November.  For [...]

Virtual anthropology

Recently, I read Tom Boellstroff’s book: “Coming of age in second life. An anthropologist explores the virtually human”. The book is an account of two years field work and an anthropological ethnography of avatar life in Second Life. Avatars are virtual personages created and Tom’s avatar was the anthropologist in 2nd Life, interviewing, observing [...]

Call for films/photo documentaries on the multicultural city

The Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity Initiative (SEED) at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa has just put out a call for video and photo presentations on the theme of the ‘multicultural city’.  Sounds like an exciting venture.  Here are the details:
Diversity in Place: Making Documentaries on the Multicultural City April 24th, 2009
http://diversityinplace.wordpress.com/
More than half [...]

Video contest: intercultural dialogue

Well, after something of a hiatus I intend to get more active with the posting from now on.
First of all, here is an announcement I just noticed on the Intersections blog about an online video competition with the theme “Intercultural Dialogue”.  Perhaps there are some young visual anthropologists who would like to put in an [...]

Downloading Firefox 3 and the digital divide

The new version of the Firefox web browser was released yesterday with much fanfare in circles that get excited about web browsers. The Mozilla folk were attempting to crack a Guinness Book record for the most downloads in one day, and they appear to have been successful with reportedly more than 8 million copies [...]

Associated Press – shocked by the value of enthnography

At the World Editors Forum in Goteborg, Sweden, today AP presented a paper produced by Baltimore-based Context-Based Research Group who conducted a research study around the world into how young people read news.
The report is available from:
http://www.ap.org/newmodel.pdf
This document provides an interesting example of how corporate ethnography is presented to businesses. Short bite sized recommendations grounded [...]

Burma, biofuels and public anthropology

Seeing as we have been talking about Burma and the cyclone, biofuels, and the role of anthropologists as public intellectuals, here is a short news piece from the ABC by Monique Skidmore, anthropologist at the ANU, which combines all three.

An Australian anthropologist says the push to grow biofuels has worsened the plight of Burmese cyclone [...]

AAA podcasts

I was delighted to discover today that the American Anthropology Association is broadcasting biweekly podcasts.  The second one reports on a letter that the AAA sent to the Thai government expressing concern about their newly relaunched “war on drugs” and extrajudicial executions during their previous drug war; a response to Stanton’s article entitled “Anthropologists agree [...]

Chicago anthropologist weighs in on “pimp-gate”

More on the U.S. presidential race and tenuous links with anthropology: Michael Silverstein, a professor of anthropology, linguistics and psychology at the University of Chicago, was asked to weigh in on “pimp-gate,” the scandal where MSNBC anchor David Shuster was suspended after suggesting on-air that the Hillary Clinton campaign was “pimping out” Clinton’s daughter, [...]

Islamic Rage Boy

 A few days ago, the British tabloid, the Daily Mail, brought an interesting story (it came to me via 3 quarks daily) . It contrasted the media and pop culture portrayal of Shakeel Ahmad Bhat known globally as Islamic Rage Boy (featured as a most frightening example of radical Islam in countless newspapers, on Jihad [...]