Recent uci_anthropology items

TV POWWW! and Televised Play in the Early Videogame Industry

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TV POWWW! was a television program built around a technology which allowed viewers to control televised videogames over the telephone. This article chronicles its history while analyzing its technology, social contexts, aesthetics, and impact on game design and development. We situate TV POWWW! at the nexus of several developments during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These include new perceptions of mediated interaction facilitated by computerization and technical communication networks, experiments in participatory television, ideas about simplified videogame design for televised play contexts, and forms of gendered spectatorship and play.

RIDING THE RAILS OF MOBILE PAYMENTS Financial Inclusion, Mobile Phones, and Infrastructure

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With the increase of digital and networked media in everyday life, researchers have increasingly turned their gaze to the symbolic and cultural elements of technologies. From studying online game communities, locative and social media to YouTube and mobile media, ethnographic approaches to digital and networked media have helped to elucidate the dynamic cultural and social dimensions of media practice. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, and conceptually cutting-edge guide to this emergent and diverse area. Features include: a comprehensive history of computers and digitization in anthropology; exploration of various ethnographic methods in the context of digital tools and network relations; consideration of social networking and communication technologies on a local and global scale; in-depth analyses of different interfaces in ethnography, from mobile technologies to digital archives.

Measuring Centrality and Power Recursively in the World City Network: A Reply to Neal

Mon, 7 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In a recent article, Zachary Neal (2011) distinguishes between centrality and power in world city networks and proposes two measures of recursive power and centrality. His effort to clarify oversimplistic interpretations of relational measures of power and position in world city networks is appreciated. However, Neal's effort to innovate methodologically is based on theoretical reasoning that is dubious when applied to world city networks. And his attempt to develop new measures is flawed since he conflates 'eigenvector centrality' with 'beta centrality' and then argues that 'eigenvector-based approaches' to recursive power and centrality are ill-suited to world city networks. The main problem is that his measures of 'recursive' centrality and power are not recursive at all and thus are of very limited utility. It is concluded that established eigenvector centrality measures used in past research (which Neal critiques) provide more useful gauges of power and centrality in world...

Mobile Money: Communication, Consumption and Change in the Payments Space

Thu, 3 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores the emerging field of 'mobile money': mobile phone-enabled systems for value transfer and storage, primarily in the developing world, which are heralded as signal interventions in the effort to broaden financial inclusion and bank the 'unbanked.' Focusing on the stories that circulate in the emergent network of expertise that is calling 'mobile money' into being, it discusses how economic techniques and social narratives about markets - specifically, narratives about the opportunities for profit and financial inclusion in the 'payments space' - format a consumer market for mobile money. Furthermore, it asks whether end-users' repurposing of mobile money - and the use of airtime as currency - heralds a new means of exchange or store of value, potentially remaking money in the process. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

AN INFRASTRUCTURAL MOMENT IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AN INFRASTRUCTURAL MOMENT IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES

Knowledge infrastructure and research agendas for quotidian Anthropocenes: Critical localism with planetary scope

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Anthropocene requires the development of new forms of knowledge and supporting sociotechnical infrastructure. While there have been calls for both interdisciplinary and community-engaged approaches, there remains a need to develop, test, and sustain modes of Anthropocene knowledge production that effectively link people working at different scales, in different sites, with many different types of expertise. In this Perspectives piece, we describe one such approach to Anthropocene knowledge production, centered in short-term Field Campuses that bring together community actors in cultural institutions, media, and government agencies with external academic researchers, bringing cultural analysis into the work of characterizing and responding to the Anthropocene. We argue that it is important to build public knowledge infrastructure that allows people to visualize and address many intersecting scales and systems (ecological, atmospheric, economic, technological, social, cultural,...

Case Study Pedagogy in Disaster Education

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: Research in cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) has demonstrated that environmental disasters are not only techno-scientifically and socio-politically complex but also epistemically complex -- involving perspectival diversity; multiple, often conflicting forms of evidence; data gaps and disinformation; and role transitions and confusions. Disasters, this research has demonstrated, are highly fraught knowledge problems that nevertheless call for pragmatic response. In this article, we describe an approach to disaster education that stems from this premise, mobilizing an Environmental Injustice Case Study Framework that draws out multiple dimensions of disaster, foregrounding the need for interdisciplinarity while immersing students in the challenges and paradoxes of disaster knowledge production. We offer both an instructional approach and a theoretical perspective on what case study pedagogy...

Late Industrialism, Advocacy, and Law: Relays Toward Just Transition

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Late Industrialism, Advocacy, and Law: Relays Toward Just Transition

Academic Navel-Gazing Debating Globalization as the Planet Burns

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Academic Navel-Gazing Debating Globalization as the Planet Burns

Paul Edward Farmer (1959–2022)

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Edward Farmer (1959–2022)

Race, Ethnicity, and Our Digital Futures: An Afterword

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Race, Ethnicity, and Our Digital Futures: An Afterword

Ebola vaccine development plan: ethics, concerns and proposed measures

Sat, 6 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

BackgroundThe global interest in developing therapies for Ebola infection management and its prevention is laudable. However the plan to conduct an emergency immunization program specifically for healthcare workers using experimental vaccines raises some ethical concerns. This paper shares perspectives on these concerns and suggests how some of them may best be addressed.DiscussionThe recruitment of healthcare workers for Ebola vaccine research has challenges. It could result in coercion of initially dissenting healthcare workers to assist in the management of EVD infected persons due to mistaken beliefs that the vaccine offers protection. It could also affect equity and justice. For example, where people who are not skilled health care professionals but who provide care to patients infected with Ebola (such as in home care settings) are not prioritized for vaccination. The possibility of study participants contracting Ebola infection despite the use of experimental vaccine, and...

Attitudes Toward Cancer Clinical Trial Participation in Young Adults with a History of Cancer and a Healthy College Student Sample: A Preliminary Investigation

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Purpose: Adolescents and young adults (AYAs) aged 15-39 at diagnosis have very low cancer clinical trial accrual rates. To date, no studies have examined attitudes toward clinical trial participation in this age range to determine if certain individuals are less likely to enroll if offered participation. The current study assessed attitudes toward participation using the Cancer Treatment Subscale of the Attitudes toward Cancer Trials Scales. Methods: Data were collected from a sample of leukemia and lymphoma survivors (n=99) and a healthy college student sample (n=397). Following a principal components analysis, two subscales-Personal Barriers/Safety and Personal Benefits-were retained for analysis. Results: In the cancer survivor group, only 14 (13.3%) reported being offered participation in a cancer clinical trial, and only 8 of those 14 (7.6% of survivors) participated. Responses from leukemia and lymphoma survivors revealed...

Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Tax Evasion: The Consequences of International Policy Initiatives on Financial Centres in the Caribbean Region , by Aretha M. Campbell

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Tax Evasion: The Consequences of International Policy Initiatives on Financial Centres in the Caribbean Region , by Aretha M. Campbell

Finding a Moral Heart for U.S. Immigration Policy: An Anthropological Perspective

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Finding a Moral Heart for U.S. Immigration Policy: An Anthropological Perspective

Confined within: National territories as zones of confinement

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The securitization of immigration has led to increased reliance on border enforcement, detention, and deportation to control unauthorized movements. Based on a case study of the ways that Salvadoran immigrants to the United States have experienced these tactics, this paper analyzes the spatial implications of current enforcement strategies. As movement across borders becomes more difficult for the unauthorized, national territories become zones of confinement. This carceral quality is a dimension of national territory in that undocumented and temporarily authorized migrants cannot exit their countries of residence without losing territorially-conferred rights, while if they are deported, their countries of origin become extensions of the detention centers they occupied before exit. This transformation of national spaces is accompanied by internal differentiation, as interior enforcement confines migrants to subnational spaces where they must remain to avoid detection or harassment....

Naming Resistance: Ethnographers, Dissidents, and States

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ethnographic analyses of political dissidence are deeply implicated in the political contests about which ethnographers write. A comparison of the authors' fieldwork among dissidents in Argentina, Kenya, and the United States reveals both the differing dynamics of contests over the political and the complex ways that ethnographers are situated within such contests. In Argentina during the last period of military rule it was dangerous to be defined as political; in Kenya, when multiparty elections were finally authorized, being recognized as political was a prerequisite for legitimacy; and in the United States, where protest is officially legal but unofficially suspect, being defined as political has advantages and disadvantages. We argue that ethnographic writing is inextricable from such contests, and we advocate more explicit attention to how anthropologists negotiate their positions during fieldwork and how they reposition themselves through their writing.

The Network Inside Out

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Network Inside Out Annelise Riles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

Citizenship and Clandestiny among Salvadoran Immigrants

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Citizenship and Clandestiny among Salvadoran Immigrants

Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Cecilia Menjívar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xiii. 301 pp., map, tables, appendixes, notes, references, index.

Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Originary destinations: Re/membered communities and Salvadoran diasporas

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay analyzes the ways that El Salvador as a site of origin is configured in relation to Salvadoran migrants in the U.S. The post-war Salvadoran government, well aware of the economic benefits of the more than 2.5 billion dollars that emigres send to relatives annually, depicted El Salvador as an object of longing, as a parent to which emigres owe continued loyalty. Interviews with Salvadoran emigres who have lived the bulk of their lives in the U.S. suggest a relationship that is more complex than depictions of longing and loyalty would imply. To them, El Salvador is less a parent to whom they owe loyalty and more a somewhat unknown but key element of their own biographies. These understandings of diaspora are used to develop the notion of re/membered communities as an alternative to Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities." Recent shifts in Salvadoran government policies toward Salvadorans in the U.S. are also considered. © 2010 The Institute, Inc.

Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States by Susan Bibler Coutin

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States by Susan Bibler Coutin

Differences within Accounts of US Immigration Law

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Differences within Accounts of US Immigration Law

In the Breach: Citizenship and its Approximations

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

To analyze the forms of membership that are created in the gap between formal citizenship and social belonging, this paper takes up three examples of citizenship in the breach: (1) the 1980-1992 Salvadoran civil war, in which human rights abuses perpetrated in El Salvador effectively constituted Salvadoran migrants as stateless persons, though technically they held Salvadoran citizenship; (2) informal U.S. membership claims put forward by longtime U.S. residents who were deported to El Salvador; and (3) the legal or documentary problems that emerge when legal permanent residents, some of whom immigrated to the United States from El Salvador during the 1980s, seek to naturalize or petition for undocumented family members. Analyzing these three examples suggests that citizenship and informal membership are defined in relation to each other, and that in moving between official citizenship and its approximations, law itself moves between legal fictions and legal realities. © Indiana...

The Comparative Study of Legal Culture Winter 2003

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Comparative Study of Legal Culture Winter 2003

Suspension of Deportation Hearings and Measures of "Americanness"

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Una forma de identificar las características que, según las autoridades y la ley, el ciudadano ideal debe de tener es estudiar casos de inmigración en corte. Por medio de observar la preparatión de tales casos, entrevistar a abogados y solicitantes, y asistir a audiencias en la corte federal de inmigración en Los Angeles, se analiza estas características. La investigatión se enfoca en los casos conocidos como "suspensión de deportatión". Para ganar, el solicitante tiene que haber vivido en los Estados Unidos por siete años, mostrar buen caracter moral y probar que deportation causarfa un dafio extremo al aplicante o a un pariente del aplicante. El anãlisis indica que, aunque no se menciona la raza ni la etnicidad del solicitante, las características preferidas se basan en la cultura anglosajóna, lo cual promueve un modelo anglosajón del cuidadano ideal. Por eso, aún cuando se ganan los casos, la ley impone requisitos que perjudican a ciertos sectores de la población.

Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America by Mae M. Ngai

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America by Mae M. Ngai

Legacies and Origins of the 1980s US-Central American Sanctuary Movement

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article re-examines the US-Central American sanctuary movement of the 1980s. Our re-examination is motivated by two factors. First, with the passage of time it is possible to discern the movement's origins in ways that could not be fully articulated while it was ongoing. We are able to show how certain relationships between the movement's North and Central American activists were celebrated, while others were obscured due to fear for Salvadoran immigrant activists' safety and concern about inadvertently undermining the movement's legitimacy. Specifically, we draw attention to the movement's transnational nature, noting that what made it so powerful was its origin as part of a broader effort by Salvadoran revolutionaries to mobilize North American society to oppose US support for the Salvadoran government. Ironically, to achieve this objective Salvadoran immigrant activists had to stay quiet, become invisible, and abstain from taking certain leadership roles, while embracing...

Contesting criminality

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As a field, criminology has paid insufficient attention to societal processes that obscure the distinction between legality and illegality, decriminalize formerly objectionable behavior or redefine law-breakers as deserving members of society. An analysis of undocumented immigrants’ efforts to redefine themselves as legal residents highlights ways that the category of the criminal is rendered unstable, suggests that logics of social control create opportunities to challenge exclusion and shows how law and illegality are entangled. For instance, individuals who are deemed socially dangerous can argue that they are low risk, or can redefine risk, highlighting the social costs of situating offenders exclusively in a domain of illegitimacy. Through such arguments, the licit can seep into and reconstitute the illegal, and vice versa. © 2005, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.

Questionable transactions as grounds for legalization: Immigration, illegality, and law

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

By differentiating between legal and illegal movements, transactions, and persons, legal prohibitions and law enforcement practices create boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate social spheres. Individuals who are located in an illegitimate domain survive at least in part through unauthorized and quasi-illegal practices. The boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate social domains are, however, permeable, making it possible for individuals who have at one time been deemed illegal to at another time claim legitimacy. This paper examines one context in which such claims are made: deportation hearings in a U.S. immigration court. During deportation hearings, undocumented immigrants' prior involvement in questionable transactions can be deemed an indication of poor moral character or of noncredibility. At the same time, such involvement can be overlooked or reinterpreted in ways that permit an undocumented immigrant to pass from illegality to legality. Close attention...

Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide

Racialization through enforcement