My dissertation, Being Both: Negotiating Identity, Surveillance, and Belonging within Queer Middle Eastern and Queer Muslim Communities in the United States, explores how queer Muslims and queer Middle Eastern people in the U.S. navigate overlapping systems of Islamophobia, racialization, and homotransphobia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and in digital spaces between 2020 […]| CaMP Anthropology
Josh Reno: I just finished your book a week ago, and I feel like it is still happening to me. It is so good at exploring anxious, uncertain moments before there’s a sense of shared understand…| CaMP Anthropology
A review of the exhibit Dolly Parton: Journey of a Seeker at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, TN By Sarah D. Phillips The exhibit Dolly Parton: Journey of a Seeker opened in May 2025 at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. It advances a straightforward argument: […]| CaMP Anthropology
by Erika Alpert Krakoan national co-founder Magneto explains to diplomats at the new Krakoan Embassy in Jerusalem why mutants have decided to create their own language, from House of X #1 (Hickman et al. 2019a, 32). In 2025, wars are raging in Ukraine and Israel and too many other places, but they all come down […]| CaMP Anthropology
by E. M. Elshaikh Last month, American Eagle released an ad campaign with actress Sydney Sweeney, modeled after a 1980s Calvin Klein denim ad. The campaign plays with the homophone jeans/genes. In …| CaMP Anthropology
The CaMP anthropology blog has been running for 10 years — our very first post was on September 4th, 2015. During this decade, we have celebrated 122 dissertations, and 302 new books. The blog started because when Indiana University dissolved the innovative and beloved department of Communication and Culture, five ethnographers moved to IU’s anthropology […]| CaMP Anthropology
My dissertation, With Other Men: Love, Narrative, and Belonging Among Same-Sex Attracted Men in New Orleans, is an ethnographic study of how love narratives—structured around the phrase “I love you”—are interdiscursively linked to broader histories of racialized exclusion, public health discourse, and queer social life. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with same-sex attracted men in monogamous, […]| CaMP Anthropology
Shannon Ward: In the Introduction, you discuss zurza as a uniquely Tibetan genre of humour. Can you say more about how you first discovered zurza as a genre? Do you remember the first Amdo Tibetan …| CaMP Anthropology
“After one candidate, the only one in a suit, described the many virtues of community involvement, a heckler shouted, “Frank, what clubs are you part of in the community?” leading the candidate to admit that he hadn’t gotten the opportunity to join any clubs…yet. The other candidate ended up winning her seat, returning to work […]| CaMP Anthropology
Page 99 of my dissertation drops the reader into what I call a “technological (dis)connective happening.” It captures a moment during the pandemic, when offline events moved online. In this scene—part of an Airbnb Online experience on Zoom—my internet connection cut out for two minutes: We could not see the others’ responses to our absence, […]| CaMP Anthropology
by Clare Wiznura The 2007 video game BioShock explores what might happen when individuals have the option to keep all the fruits of their labour, free from taxes or restrictions on their work. The …| CaMP Anthropology
The 99th page of my dissertation is nestled within Chapter 3: When Words Fail: Therapeutic Aspects of Visual Arts—my favorite chapter. Conveniently, by explaining this chapter, I also show what my …| CaMP Anthropology
Interviewed by Kristina Jacobsen Kristina Jacobsen: Your book takes up two longstanding interests of anthropology: Indigeneity and modernity. Did you originally set out to study these topics or did…| CaMP Anthropology
Each week, I wrack my brain to come up with an interesting topic that will hopefully spark discussion amongst my readers. It doesn’t sound like a difficult job, but after coming up with topics each…| Leah's Books
One of the best infrequently recurring Saturday Night Live sketches stars Bill Hader as the sardonic host of a game show called “What’s That Name?” As he explains, “The rules are simple, we show you a person, and you tell us their name.” Here’s the latest iteration from earlier this year: The script follows the […]| The Christian Rationalist
America is facing a loneliness epidemic. So many of us wish that we had more community in our lives, but don’t know how to organically build it. We feel the pain of losing community as we inevitably leave home or graduate college, wondering, “Will I ever find a community like this again?” So we check […]| The Christian Rationalist
Grace and I recently spent our vacation in Singapore over her Spring Break. From the moment that Grace’s parents picked us up at the airport to when they brought us back a week later, our trip was filled with what I’ve now come to expect from Singapore: gatherings with friends and family, often over good […]| The Christian Rationalist
Queuing, or as we Americans call it, waiting in line, is everywhere in modern life. From grocery store registers to vacations at Disney to daily commutes by car, we spend minutes every day waiting our turn. Most discussions of queuing focus on the individual: How can you avoid waiting in line, or make the most […]| The Christian Rationalist
Related: Cherish Thick Communities. What does it take to live a meaningful life? When everything is said and done, what will truly have mattered? Is it the accomplishments we achieved, the recognition we received, the legacy we left behind? Or is there something inherently meaningful in the lives we lead, the experiences we cherish, the […]| The Christian Rationalist
When I first heard about the concept of a Career Fair in my freshman year at Caltech, I half-joked to my friends, “I don’t want a career!” I came to college to learn math and science, and was quite honestly disgusted with classmates who would choose their course loads, student groups, or volunteer opportunities for […]| The Christian Rationalist
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been fascinated and inspired by an important milestone at the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence: The first 11 games of StarCraft played between professional StarCraft players and AlphaStar, a team of AI StarCraft agents built by DeepMind, the team behind previous expert-defeating game-players AlphaGo and AlphaZero. It started […]| The Christian Rationalist
Since starting work in November, my morning routine has become pretty regular. After my alarm goes off for the final time, I turn over and grab my iPad. I check e-mail, Slack, and so on, and then if I have some extra time, I browse Twitter. I set up my Twitter feed in 2016 after […]| The Christian Rationalist
Last fall, I participated in a job-seeking fellowship called Insight Data Science. The official program lasts for seven very full weeks, but the job-seeking process continues afterwards for anywhere between a few weeks and a few months. I was one of the lucky ones to get a job in the month following the program. So […]| The Christian Rationalist
I started my 2019 blog reboot last week with retrospective reflections on my life in 2018, and as is common this time of year, I’d like to follow it up with my goals for 2019. In compiling th…| The Christian Rationalist
