Are you going to the AAAs? If so, I hope to meet you! Let me take the opportunity to rep a few sessions, the Savage Minds panel at 8 am Saturday, my panel at 10:15 am Thursday, and the panel I co-organized at 4 pm on Thursday. Savage Minds is also hosting a gathering with HAU on Saturday evening. As always, send me any links at rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com.
The mass resignation of the editors of Lingua over a disagreement with Elsevier reignited the conversation about Open Access, and many anthro blogs picked up the topic. The Chronicle of Higher Education breaks down the costs of Open Access publishing with publisher the Open Library of the Humanities, as well as some of their funding models (ranging from the use of volunteer labor to grants): What Open-Access Publishing Actually Costs
Allegra Laboratory examines different models attempting to make Open Access economically viable: Are There Alternatives to Traditional Academic Publishing? #OA
This post on Aidnography suggests that Open Access may not automatically lead to meaningful engagement with scholars’ work: The Answer to Academic Publishing Challenges is Not Always Open Access
Allegra Laboratory examines how crises, such as the Greek economic condition under austerity, are constructed and understood in Crisis and Continuity: A Critical Look at the “European Refugee” Crisis. The post closes with the suggestion that Syrians have come to assume the position of the ideal refugee because their race and class status makes them more palatable than other refugees.
This post on West’s Meditations argues that returning to the historic core of anthropological investigation, small-scale non-industrialized societies, would restore the disciplinary boundaries between anthropology and sociology in a productive way: Industrialisation Was a Big Change: Anthropology/Sociology. Do you agree with the claim that anthropology is “a discipline with a method and no circumscribed subject matter”?
Standplaats Wereld gives us a brief glimpse into how massive multiplayer online games handle the death of characters and the players behind them: The Here and Now After is Online: Death and Afterlife in Virtual Gaming Worlds
The AAA blog features this interview about a new documentary film about Margaret Mead and contemporary anthropologist Susie Crate: The Anthropologist: An Interview with Director Seth Kramer
This Somatosphere post examines the creation of financial instruments like the World Bank’s “Ebola bonds” to fund global health (countries at risk can buy short-term insurance against epidemics), as well as the “bundling” of health technologies by patent acquisition companies, known as “patent trolls”: The Financialization of Ebola
In what this Slate article refers to as “archaeology in reverse,” 13th-century Guédelon Castle is being (there’s a paywall but you get 5 free articles a month). Guédelon Castle in France: An Archaeological Experiment. You can read more about it at the project website.
See you next week!