As most of you know, I just finished up my PhD and am getting ready to start a fabulous job at Texas A&M in the Fall. It's been crazy getting the dissertation finished and preparing for the move. But I have a couple nerdy academic things to share. First, I am officially published! One of my articles came out last month in Anthropological Quarterly ( Read more... )

...of being an American, Rachel Ray goes and ruins it all!

And, is nothing sacred anymore in our country? Even Starbucks is under attack!

Poor corporations. Can't we just cut them some slack, people?

CA Supreme Court overturns gay marriage ban

Geez. What is it with undergrads and their inability to use words properly (and their inability to write professional emails, the subject of a future rant)? I got an email today asking me about what Indian expats in Dubai do on "there day off" and whether "they enjoy there life in Dubai." Every quarter, after grading the first set of papers or ( Read more... )

Hi all. Or perhaps I should say y'all. or actually "all y'all," which is, according to trivial pursuit, the official plural of y'all. Anyway, the point of the post: I wanted to let everyone know that my job hunt has been successful and as of the fall, I will be Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies at Texas A&M University. Texas ( Read more... )

Oh, did you think I meant United Arab Emirates? Nope, this time it is United States of America. These headhunters and the corporations they serve are multinational and the connections between "guest worker" labor recruitment, conditions, and regulations need to be looked at through the connections between locations, not as isolated incidents in ( Read more... )

Funny. I was thinking this morning about a post I wanted to write about anthropology's inadvertent complicity with state projects of exclusion in the way they define the boundaries of national populations in knowledge production (more on that at a later date), when I came across this from Reuters:

The latest tactic in Iraq: anthropology

By Peter ( Read more... )

Hi all. The reason I have not been posting is because job season is high upon us here in the ivory tower (which is actually more like a cement parking structure at UCI, but hey, whatever). I have to date applied for over 50 jobs. Yup, that's right. My advisor's motto is "never turn down a job you don't have yet," meaning apply everywhere and don't ( Read more... )

I know, I haven't posted in a really long time, so I am bombarding you with the second of the day. Maybe that makes up for it a little bit:

Over at the UAE community, people are talking about American researcher Syed Ali's experience of being detained, having his research data confiscated, and then being immediately deported from Dubai in 2006. As a ( Read more... )

Ed and I returned from a 9-day fast-paced and awesome (in the real sense of the word) trip to Egypt about a week ago. Pics can be found here.

I have to say the age of some of the stuff, and the size, and the vast amounts of perfectly preserved artifacts, and the fabulous organized chaos of the Egyptian tourist industry, and the Nile, and EVERYTHING ( Read more... )