Research Interests

I am interested in collaborative research methods, and the growth of anthropology online. [okay hound me for being way too vague, but for now lets look at “method” as in, publishing medium, discussion format, style]. I’m particularly interested in open-access journals, and feel that opening up academic publishing is an enormously important step for anthropology. Of course, I don’t know the whole story yet, but prior to beginning this anthropological journey I worked as a web developer for 10 years, and I have enormous bias favoring all open source and open access projects. Delving into the interesting colonial history of anthropology, and into discussions of globalization and neoliberal economic injustice, it’s pretty easy to see how it makes sense to make anthropological work freely available to the world that it studies.

In this way I’ll be exploring ways to study online communities – in this case communities of anthropologists. Its an exciting time for anthropology online. I’ve been following anthropology blogs for a year now, and its amazing how fast its growing. Its quite inspiring, and I think reflects a very vibrant community thats just itching to work (and fight) with each other! So while my research proposal is extremely vague, and I’ve been made aware of this, I’m absolutely confident that the internet, blogs, and the desire to liberate anthropological knowledge from the world economy are fueling a change in anthropology, and that within this excitement I’ll find an interesting “field” of study.

This is also an invitation to all other interested parties who might like to collaborate on research ideas and methods!