Ethnography Lab
19 Russell Street, Room 330, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 2S2 Toronto, ON, Canada

Ethnographic listening #9: Jessica Cattelino reading her flash ethnography essay "Place at a Distance." https://americanethnologist.org//flash/place-at-a-distance

Today on the blog, Nina Medvedeva explores how AirBnB ratings contribute to "discriminatory spatialization" in Washington DC, and the practices rooted in Black platform geographies through which hosts resist this discrimination http://blog.castac.org//airbnbs-location-ratings-as-anti-/

Reminder: Join us on Mar. 20 at 11 AM Pacific Time for a workshop on how to apply to be a 2021 Society for Visual Anthropology Lemelson Fellow. We'll discuss how to apply, what funds can be used for, and answer your questions! Register in advance here: http://ow.ly/V9XZ50E2Ieb

Keith Wailoo, "Spectacles of Difference: The Racial Scripting of Epidemic Disparities," Bulletin of the History of Medicine (paywall). Summary: "This essay expl...ores how epidemics in the past and present give rise to distinctive, recurring racial scripts about bodies and identities, with sweeping racial effects beyond the Black experience. Using examples from cholera, influenza, tuberculosis, AIDS, and COVID-19, the essay provides a dramaturgical analysis of race and epidemics in four acts, moving from Act I, racial revelation; to Act II, the staging of bodies and places; to Act III, where race and disease is made into spectacle; and finally, Act IV, in which racial boundaries are fixed, repaired, or made anew in the response to the racial dynamics revealed by epidemics. Focusing primarily on North America but touching on global racial narratives, the essay concludes with reflections on the writers and producers of these racialized dramas, and a discussion of why these racialized repertoires have endured." See more

"...the crisis we just experienced was waking from a dream, a confrontation with the actual reality of human life, which is that we are a collection of fragile ...beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and that a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings. It is imperative that we not slip back into a reality where all this makes some sort of inexplicable sense, the way senseless things so often do in dreams." See more