Black youth experiences at a progressive low-fee private school in a postapartheid city illuminate the politics and limits of aspiration. On January 15, two days before the start of the 2024 school year, I joined 50 grade eight students and their guardians for an orientation at Launch, a high school in one of Cape Town’s oldest townships. Townships are peri-urban areas designated for black inhabitation by colonial and apartheid laws that largely remain marginalized despite South Africa’s 1994 democratic transition. Founded in 2004, Launch is a network of eight low-fee priva ..read more

In May and June of 2024, the AAA hosted three interns through the Virtual High School Internship. Their main assignment was to choose a peer-reviewed paper in one of the AnthroSource journals, and along the way, they engaged in a variety of enriching activities: Research Projects: They read scholarly research articles, took them apart to see how they were constructed, and communicated their methods and findings to diverse audiences. Professional Development: They explored the theory of praxis, the methods of autoethnography, the institutions of scholarly publishing, and the techniques of scie ..read more

Issued: July 15, 2024  Pitches due: rolling until November 1, 2024  First drafts due: 3 weeks after pitch decision  Submit Here Anthropology News invites submissions on the forms of care that permeate human and nonhuman worlds. How do we care for ourselves and others? How do we care for objects, archives, words, history, traditions, animals, plants, ideas, and obligations? How can care be a form of resistance or persistence amid violence or change? How do forms of care interact with the ways people work, play, love, evoke the past or future, or engage politically?  An ..read more

This short piece is based on Hazal Aydın’s Middle East Section 2023 Best Graduate Paper Prize-winning essay drawing on her MA thesis. Thinking about gray areas when it comes to discussing sexual harassment and silence is always tricky and uncomfortable. We tend to think that dwelling in grayness weakens our feminist anger and struggles, especially in the face of chauvinist efforts to discredit women’s voices and resistances. #MeToo movements once again showed us the multifaceted forms of power relations that create institutionalized silences and the ways in which they are maintained. However ..read more

1935-2023 David C. Grove, 1935-2023 David C. Grove, Jubilee Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Courtesy Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida, passed away on May 24, 2023, at the age of 87 after a long illness. His career trajectory focused on the archaeology of complex societies in central Mexico c. 1000–500 BC in the Formative (Preclassic) period. He was best known for his excavations at Chalcatzingo, a precocious Formative regional center with many stone carvings in highland central Mexico Dave’s professional life spann ..read more

An anthropologist and a psychologist walk into a bank and decide to study Artificial Intelligence (AI). It sounds like the start of a joke—except, instead of a punchline, the result is a year’s worth of insights and the story of how we created a whole new industry research program to get them. At this point you might be thinking, what are social scientists even doing at a bank? As user researchers at TD Bank, a Canadian financial institution, our team specializes in understanding emerging technologies and the future of money. As the world continues to shift and we are catapulted into the ..read more

How have you encountered AI today? Perhaps you listened to music recommended by an AI algorithm, used a navigational app to check AI-predicted traffic conditions, auto-captioned videos with AI-powered voice recognition, or checked email without even noticing the AI-filtered spam messages.  AI is shaping our everyday lives, but as anthropology teaching faculty, most of our recent AI-related conversations have had a singular focus: how to deal with generative AI tools like ChatGPT in the classroom. The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked panic among instructors who realized it ..read more

When AI-generated images began to flood the internet in autumn 2022, beholders were struck by the naturalism of these algorithmically rendered human figures, objects, and environments. One niggling issue became apparent though: the AIs couldn’t get a handle on the finer details of human anatomy. Hands, ears, teeth, and toes appeared in uncanny forms, exhibiting too few or too many articulations, strange meldings, impossible configurations. Some commentators breathed a sigh of relief at this evidence of AI fallibility. Others reflected on why these glitched details caused (human) viewers so muc ..read more

Language work defines the globalized new economy and, with it, strategies for managing how we do language. Emerging voice technologies in contexts like call centers represent the latest attempt to create the perfect language worker.  Who Am I Speaking With? Grace is, by all accounts, the perfect call center operator. She picks up calls without hesitation and, not one to interrupt, listens patiently to the customer’s every need. When it’s time to speak, Grace responds with both reassurances and practical solutions. All the while, she reminds the customer of her attention through subtle cue ..read more

Can ChatGPT tell a joke in Singlish? In recent years, AI-powered chatbots based on large language models (LLMs)—especially ChatGPT, but also bots like Google Bard—have increasingly generated both excitement and alarm. The tools demonstrate an uncanny ability to seemingly do everything a human can do, from writing award-winning novels and generating academic articles that get past rigorous peer-review processes to DungeonMastering some pretty good DND playthroughs. LLMs’ seemingly limitless abilities have led to widespread celebration and awe, but they’ve also been ..read more