Good morning #4s2025 in Seattle! I'm excited to learn and mingle with STS folks! Starting off at the AI and Ground Truth with Dietmar Offenhuber, Beth Coleman and Gabriella Coleman. 🤩 Come say "Hi 👋" if you see me.

Come work with me at @txst.edu! 🤩 Tenure-track Asst Prof in cultural anth with a #MedAnth focus. We seek a broadly trained cultural or linguistic anth whose expertise focuses on the study of health, illness and the institutional and social forces that shape them. jobs.hr.txstate.edu/postings/53850

CASTAC has stickers! 🤩 Donate and receive 4" vinyl stickers to show your CASTAC support! 💰 Every contribution goes directly toward sustaining CASTAC’s current initiatives and building new ones. 🔗 castac.org/donate #anthropology #STS #technoscience #fundraising #donate @castac.bsky.social

Today I got to celebrate the graduation of my two brilliant students, Manar Naser & Ian Whitehead, who completed their MA today. 🥳 It has been such a privilege to spend the last two years thinking with these inspirational students. You'll both be missed! Congratulations! 👏

I recently got to sit down with Abigail Letsinger to chat about anthropology careers and the applications of anthropology to business and entrepreneurship on AnthroPuzzled 🎙️! Check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, YouTube, or anthropuzzled.com 👉 tinyurl.com/anthropuzzled

Final Call! CASPR 2025 starts 90 minutes! ⏰ 👉 caspr2025.eventbrite.com Come talk about Knowledge in Crisis with Alex Hanna, Emily Yates-Doerr, and Juno Salazar Parrenas at 11AM (CDT) TODAY!

Excited for this session with @castac.bsky.social next Friday!

CASPR 2025 🌼"Knowledge in Crisis: Navigating Science in Uncertain Times" with @alexhanna.bsky.social, @eyatesd.bsky.social , & @youknowjuno.bsky.social—moderated by @castac.bsky.social. Panel + Breakout Q&A. 📅Friday May 2, 11AM - 1PM (Central) on Zoom ✍️Register: caspr2025.eventbrite.com

[CASPR 2025] Knowledge in Crisis: Navigating Science in Uncertain Times May 2 11AM CDT Join us for a roundtable discussion and Q&A with Alex Hanna, Emily Yates-Doerr, & Juno Salazar Parrenas, moderated by CASTAC Co-Chair Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes caspr2025.eventbrite.com #anthropology #STS

My graduate students have taken to sending me photos of their animals when they send me drafts of their work. So far I've received cats, dogs, baby goats, cows, and a calf. I return photos of my cats. In these unsettled and unsettling times, these small moments of connection and care mean so much.

The 2025 David Hakken Graduate Student Prize is now open for submissions! We invite current or recent graduate students to submit papers showcasing innovative research at the intersection of anthropology and STS. 🗓️ Deadline: June 1, 2025 🔗 Details: castac.org/castac-award...

🚨 Attention grad students! The 2025 David Hakken Graduate Student Prize is now open! Submit your unpublished paper (7,000-8,000 words) on anthropology & STS by June 1, 2025. Check the guidelines and learn more here: castac.org/castac-award... #Anthropology #CASTAC #GradLife

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I have this conversation often with students. This take is dangerous. It seems intuitive but it very much misunderstands how knowledge is produced in the social sciences; how and when that knowledge should be communicated for a general audience; and what good public access to research is for. 🧵

A+

The tech/hacker community can do this work and the data is already being collected here, now someone needs to whip up a nice looking website: old.reddit.com/r/Keep_Track...

There is nothing that can break me out of writing fatigue and apathy as quickly as reading recent research publications. I've spent my afternoon clearing out my backlog of journal ToC RSS feeds and now all I want to do is jump back into these inspiring, insightful, and energizing conversations. 🤩

A close 2nd is the feel of opening the hollow, puffy, molded plastic cases of Disney VHS. No cardboard sleeves for these. Slightly textured, thick, clear plastic film protecting the images. A delicate squeak as you pulled the sides apart or closed them. The rattle of the VHS as you pried it out.

Pressing the lever buttons on my cassette player—the resistance to being pressed, the hard plastic ridges, the audible click when pushed all the way down, and the way you needed to, with two fingers, press record at the same time and a tiny bit more than play to record your fav song on the radio.

For me: 1. To be an Archaeologist/Egyptologist. 2. Anthropology 3. Same major but switch subfields from archaeology to sociocultural anthropology. 4. Business and Design Anthropologist currently an Asst. Prof of Applied Anthropology (with a decade+ foray into IT, design and strategy)

“Where are the findings? You only provide quotes.” New article considers qualitative researchers’ experiences of methodologically incongruent peer review feedback Open Access: dx.doi.org/10.1037/qup0... Few quotes follow 🧵

Is sociocultural #anthropology a career? 🤔 In my chapter for this brilliant new volume, I argue that anthropology is not a #career in the same way that other majors are—that is a specific set of skills and knowledge for a specific set of occupations.💡 bit.ly/4iFD2L5 🧵

Setting aside the UX and Al fiasco that is #SpotifyWrapped this year, ionnalee, again this year, made the music that sang to my soul -(and this doesn't even include the listens on vinyl). Highly recommend this independent artist and her audiovisual Swedish electropop art. 💜

"Bluesky's vision for the new “social internet” is very much a libertarian worldview that is as old as the commercial web itself. [...] What [technocrats] never admit to, though, is that the digital spaces we spend our time in are rarely communities. They're markets."

Come work with us!! We're searching for a new team of Contributing and Multimodal Editors to write, create, curate, and edit pieces for Platypus, the CASTAC blog. Applications (CV & cover letter) due December 5 More info: blog.castac.org/call-for-mce... Please share widely!📩

Happening tomorrow at 11:45AM (EDT) via zoom! Annual CASTAC Business Meeting Calling all #anthropology and #STS folks to join our community, learn what we're up to, and get involved! castac.org/bmtg

Are you interested in STS and Anthropology? Join CASTAC! Our annual business meeting is November 2024, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM (EDT) and online (via Zoom). All are welcome! We are a diverse community of academic and practicing anthropologists of all levels.

So incredibly lucky to be Manar Naser's thesis advisor! Can't wait to see this thesis complete later this year and where her career will go next! #anthropology #STS #AI

Are you a millennial in your yacht rock era but still clinging to the 80s/90s like that was 10 yrs ago? Well, today I discovered Yacht Boy Summer. Float into the weekend with classics like Yacht Hole Sun, Yachtstruck, & Crazy Yacht. You're welcome. 🛥️ 🎶 open.spotify.com/album/0Ldc0X...

I'll be accepting 1-2 MA/PhD students to join my advisee workgroup in the InnoAnth Lab from this year's applicants. I mentor students interested in the areas of Science & Tech Studies, Design Anth, Business Anth, & related areas. Learn More: go.txstate.edu/05d

"Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found." www.crikey.com.au/2024/09/03/a...

Interested in SXSW EDU 2025? College of Liberal Arts TXST has put together a panel on the Humanity of AI with me, Aimee Kendall Roundtree, Anthony Cross, & Louie Dean Valencia. Sound interesting? Vote for our panel to be added to the program! panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/153805

People don't know what they want until you show it to them." 🤦‍♀️ This mindset is a terrible misunderstanding of how innovation happens. 🧵 #anthropology #innovation #entrepreneurship

Is anyone else all of a sudden getting a bunch of requests from students asking for interviews or meetings to discuss *their* research only to bait-and-switch it into a sales call or R&D interview for some for-profit company (that is not their own)? 😬

Ever notice that sometimes it feels like tech and business live on a different plane of existence from the rest of us—like when you see a business launch an AI "friend" necklace that records everything you say and do? 🙃 ...

"A career in the neoliberal university requires writing a lot, even more, ever faster. What have you published? What’s in your pipeline? I write ‘what I can,’ but oftentimes not ‘how I want.’" — Reading this, I felt it down to my bones. doi.org/10.1080/1475...

This has been rather obvious since early on. The elephant in the room isn't that AI might eat itself by eating some mythical wild Internet. It's that our economy is currently structured to favor fast, short-sighted gains over people, society, and culture. techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/m...

One of the fascinating elements of my research in Stockholm's innovation ecosystem, was in the dissonance between "how innovation happens" and "how to make innovation happen." 🤔

A strange part of doing the (necessarily, importantly, and relatively) slow work of ethnographic research among entrepreneurial communities is how quickly what was once described to me as absolute irreplaceable pillars of the community fade and disappear.

May everyone struggling to feel confident in their work and dreams be blessed with the level of audacity held by Spectrum as they spam their customers with upgrade emails during a Texas-sized internet outage. 🙏

New website dropped. I think it's time to finally figure out my online presence post-Twitter-Muskification. This is a start. Still not sure where I'll land. You can find all my profiles on the site. Follow for hot and researched takes on innovation, entrepreneurship, anthropology, etc. ak.vbroek.org