As the buds start popping out on the northern hemisphere, I emerge with your readings for the week.

As contemporary travel writing continues to perpetuate colonialist ideas and ignore the impact of military occupation in Hawaii; I ask all readers to never call poke, “sashimi salad”.

As violence in Chicago increases due to rising socioeconomic disparity and racial segregation, friendship among children are clouded with apprehension, fear, and strategic choices.

The current political climate will undoubtedly provide artists with new material for years to come, but fifty artists reflect on the power of art as a form of protest and their duty to speak truth to power.

Brandon Jones offers a few tips and suggestions on how to teach climate change in a humanities environment.

Speaking of climate change, Medical Anthropology Quarterly posted a series of essays on “Sensorial Engagements with a Toxic World”.

Allegra Laboratory posts an essay on the lives of Syrian women in Istanbul and the role gender has on their displacement.

If you need a quick introduction of Edward Said and Orientalism to Facebook friends that continue to post xenophobic garbage, Al Jazeera posted an easy to digest short video that complicates the binary thinking of the West.

I hope all of our readers are riding the waves of energy that came from all the actions and demonstrations the past week in order to fight fascism. If you could not make it to a march, I hope you were part of the Read-in last week and follow the Facebook group to keep up with future readings!

Reading “Society Must Be Defended” is the only the most recent in anthropology’s history with the teach-in. Cultural Anthropology provides a brief history of the teach-in and why anthropologists need to continue the tradition today.

Cultural Anthropology also released a series of readings under the title “The Rise of Trumpism” that asks the uncomfortable questions to guide future action in the face of a Trump presidency. If the past few days did not solidify the role of academics in politics, anthropologists need to diversify the way scholarship reaches the public in order to combat the coming bigotry from an emboldened far right.

As neoliberalism continues to waver in the winds of political change, anthropologists in higher education will have to teach students who live in the turmoil of economic and political crisis. Anthropology News looks to innovations in pedagogy in order to find where anthropology will be in the face of labor automation and privatization.

Just a few days in the Trump administration, reproductive healthcare and public arts are in danger due to executive orders. As I type this the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines gained new life and moving forward with their construction. As museums and other cultural institutions are at risk, the American Alliance of Museums put out a call to action. Anthropologists have a stake in so many of our endangered institutions, complacency is no longer acceptable.

To start this post off, I want to remind readers of our Read-In on January 20, 2017 where we will read Michel Foucault’s lecture eleven of “Society Must Be Defended” from March 17, 1976. The Read-In will be between 10AM and 10PM Eastern Standard Time and after a discussion will be held in person, through #ReadIn, or on the Facebook page found here.

Now for the weekly readings!

If the role of anthropologists and fellow academics are still in question in the coming years, Mark Edelman on a blog post for PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review summarizes what is at stake for our communities if we do not take action against the current wave of authoritarianism.

We want you to all check out the blog Academography: Critical Ethnography & Higher Education. Similar to this blog’s vein, Academography is a collaborative blog that brings together work from interdisciplinary scholars under the umbrella term “Critical University Studies”.

The documentary What Was Ours was recently shown through PBS’s Independent Lens and currently available online to view. The film follows two Arapaho youth and a Shoshone elder as they travel to the Field Museum in Chicago to find objects that detail the history and future of indigenous life in the Americas.

Jason Hickel from the London School of Economics illustrates the huge clandestine profits made by rich countries that are obscured under the veil of “aid” to poorer countries. The article would work in classes and conversations that deal with globalization and its repercussions.

Zhou Youguang, the inventor of Pinyin, or the most commonly accepted method to Romanize Chinese has died at the age of 111.

In Switzerland, naturalization into citizenship is dealt with at the canton and municipal level, not the federal. In short, you can be denied citizenship for annoying your neighbors.

The American Anthropological Association is hosting a webinar titled “Social Science Advocacy in 2017 and Beyond” on Wednesday, January 25, 2017 between 2PM and 3PM to discuss social and behavioral science research in a turbulent political climate. RSVP at this link.

That is all for now, please read and discuss for our Read-In this week!

I hope the students and professors that are finishing up their terms in the coming weeks are surviving the last wave of work before taking a well-deserved break. If you need some ideas for papers or just procrastination, here are some readings!

The American Anthropological Association released a blog post that defines concrete steps for professors and those who work in academia to support undocumented students written by three scholars at University of California, Irvine.

Rachel Barney, professor at University of Toronto proposes a 10-point “Anti-Authoritarian Academic Code of Conduct” 

Months after the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, financial instability in the city due to ill-informed policy changes are forcing public employees, artists, and citizens to take to the street to protest political corruption.

To those interested in visual anthropology, photojournalist Matt Black photographed “poverty areas” across the U.S. where poverty rates exceed 20% in beautiful black and white photographs. Along this line of thought, University of Michigan released a series of videos profiling Jason de León and the Undocumented Migration Project where he uses analogue photography as a major methodology. (Part 1) (Part 2) (En Español)

The Times of Higher Education gathers recent conversations surrounding ethnography in changing political climates in fieldsites and at home institutions. Issues brought up by the article include increasing political violence in the field, biases in employment when considering fieldsites, and the dismissal of auto-ethnography.

Riham Alkousaa laments the role of social media in the Syrian Revolution and how Facebook content actually hurt revolutionaries through pacifying international solidarity and making it easier to find individuals involved in the revolution.

See you next week!

So after a week of visiting family for Thanksgiving and slowly accepting the crushing weight of neoliberalism that came crashing down in 2016. I come back with readings to begin the last month of the year.

American Ethnologist posts an interview with Lila Abu-lughod on the impact of her groundbreaking work and reflections on the aftermath of unstable times.

Post-Thanksgiving, Anne Keala-Kelly considers the role of media like Disney in erasing colonialism and the realities of indigenous life throughout the world.

A piece that only gains relevance in the past few weeks, Current Affairs illustrates the history and importance of “political vulgarity”. Your newly nihilistic friends and family may enjoy you validating their frustrations as subversions of the current political climate.

If you need a gift idea for the ethnographer in mind, Public Books released a list of novels based on anthropologists (ignore the cringe inducing first paragraph).

Are you a dirty liberal professor trying to indoctrinate pure American youth with your vile leftist propaganda? Well if you are, I hope you stand strong as the spectre of Joseph McCarthy looms over us once again.

Enjoy the first days of December!

I am slowly recovering from the emotions of realizing a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and noted reality TV star will be the U.S. president for four long years. The onslaught of articles, op-ed pieces, and commentary trying to explain the cherry on top of a year filled with unprecedented global changes did little to ease the anxiety of seeing the product of dominant economic and political ideologies. Anthropologists are no stranger to the public with articles coming out in force such as:

A two-part series of posts by Paul Stoller on the importance of anthropology before and after November 8th.

The American Anthropological Society pushed for anthropology to be protected in a time where higher education is in peril

The Geek Anthropologist positions public anthropology as expanding conversations outside of academia.

Kristina Killgrove on Powered by Osteons details the experience of teaching students that subscribe to the ideology of Trump. 

Anyone who reads this blog regularly would advocate the importance of anthropology in a globalizing world, but we need more than theory and discussion. Public anthropology that only exists in university classrooms and op-eds does not actually engage the public. What does anthropology do for the student who cannot afford college to attend lectures? Working adults trying to survive in growing economic disparity? How will a new ethnography prevent violence being done to the people we study? What do neologisms that are unintelligible for someone without a humanities degree do for the public? The life of articles in the era of click-bait saturating the social media landscape are days at best. Many Trump supporters have college degrees and had ample opportunity to study the world-shaking discipline of anthropology, what does anthropology do for those who do not want to understand cultural relativism?

Obviously, I see the importance of higher education and anthropological representation in press, but when will conversations lead to action? How does a public anthropology manifest in concrete and material change for the people we engage with? How public anthropology manifests with increasing violence in the U.S. and around the world is still in debate, but it is clear that conversation alone is not enough. Anthropology does not have the luxury of existing solely in print; to do so is to accept irrelevance.

As the days get longer, the temperature drops, the midterm workload grows larger; I offer distractions from the stress of the week!

Feel free to share this handy flowchart to students, friends, and family to prevent them from being a racist for this year’s Halloween.

Anthropologists are far from the days when Margaret Mead was one of the most visible public intellectuals in the 1960’s and 1970’s. How can ethnography for the public live a second life in the 21st century. Read an interview between Alma Gottleib and Guest Writer Kristen Ghodsee on Ghodsee’s new book From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies that Everyone Can Read. 

Chinese children who are born in the U.S. and raised back in China, while their parents work in the states are sometimes referred to as “satellite babies”. NPR details the nuance of coming back to the U.S. for school and the role that institutions play in their coming of age. 

The stereotype of Native Americans being predisposed to alcoholism follows a history of pathologizing inferiority under colonialism. An article by Pacific Standard complicates the narrative of alcohol abuse in indigenous communities by looking at the issue through a postcolonial lens. 

In a blog post for NOTCHES, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci details the history of venereal disease prevention in Japan. As panic surrounding foreigners, sex workers, and queer people in Japan grew; discrimination begins to foster rising rates of STIs.

In the new movie Arrival, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis gets the cinematic treatment in a linguist’s attempt to communicate with aliens. 

Hope you have a great week!