Christine Z Miller – författare

The Routledge Companion to Practicing Anthropology and Design provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the relationship between these two fields and their current state, outlining key concepts and current debates as well as positing directions for future practice and research.

Bringing together original work from a diverse group of established and emerging professionals, this volume joins a wider conversation about the trajectory of this transdisciplinary movement inspired by the continuing evolution of anthropology and design as they have adapted to accelerating and unpredictable conditions in arenas that span sectors, economies, socio-cultural groups, and geographies. It homes in on both the growing convergence and tensions between them while exploring how individuals from both fields have found ways of mixing, experimenting, and evolving theory and new forms of practice, highlighting the experimental theories and practices their transdisciplinarity has generated.

The Routledge Companion to Practicing Anthropology and Design is a valuable reference tool for practitioners, scholars, and upper-level students in the fields of anthropology and design as well as related disciplines.

The Routledge Companion to Practicing Anthropology and Design provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the relationship between these two fields and their current state, outlining key concepts and current debates as well as positing directions for future practice and research.

Bringing together original work from a diverse group of established and emerging professionals, this volume joins a wider conversation about the trajectory of this transdisciplinary movement inspired by the continuing evolution of anthropology and design as they have adapted to accelerating and unpredictable conditions in arenas that span sectors, economies, socio-cultural groups, and geographies. It homes in on both the growing convergence and tensions between them while exploring how individuals from both fields have found ways of mixing, experimenting, and evolving theory and new forms of practice, highlighting the experimental theories and practices their transdisciplinarity has generated.

The Routledge Companion to Practicing Anthropology and Design is a valuable reference tool for practitioners, scholars, and upper-level students in the fields of anthropology and design as well as related disciplines.

This book shares innovative approaches to effectively engage students and faculty working in research labs, lab-based classrooms and courses to build inclusive ethical cultures. The frameworks and approaches presented move beyond traditional research ethics training to strengthen the ethical culture in research labs. The chapters in the book showcase best practices and approaches to embedding educational interventions in courses, research labs and departments. The book is based on the two-day workshop “Building Inclusive Ethical Cultures in STEM” (April 23-24, 2021). Moving beyond the two-day conference that inspired this collected volume, the various chapters address questions like: What are approaches and tools to integrate ethics education in STEM effectively? How can STEM ethics education be improved? What can researchers do to build more inclusive research environments? How can meaningful discussions about ethics be effectively integrated into STEM courses, research labs, and workplace environments? While each chapter takes a different perspective and is located in its respective context, the contributions are united by the goal of effectively including ethical reflection in STEM education. Instructors from both four-year and two-year colleges who teach STEM and lab-based STEM courses; young principal investigators/junior faculty who are in the process of building their research groups; departmental chairs interested in programmatic approaches for improving mentoring, research ethics education, and the research culture of their department, will find this work to be a very valuable resource in their daily practice.

This book provides a critical perspective on technology, answering the questions of why technologies often disappoint. It takes a sociotechnical and historical perspective on technology, as developed by an engineer–anthropologist and a design anthropologist, to answer questions not only about why modern societies have great expectations of technology, but also of why these technologies often fail to meet expectations. Modern societies often search for technological solutions (“technofixes”) to what are institutional problems, which include border crossings or urban mobility, or improvements in productivity or improved communication. It is disappointing when technofixes, whether border walls or driverless cars or social media, fail to live up to their promises of greater personal autonomy (such as afforded by driverless cars) or improved social harmony through social media. Examining technology from the perspectives of instrumentality (“tools”), identity (“totems”), and world-defining systems (“totalities”) develops a comprehensive perspective that is at once historically informed and cross-culturally accurate. Although instrumentality is obvious and is at the core of any understanding of technology, identity is less so; yet many modern “tribes” create their identity in terms of technological objects and systems, whether transport systems (cars and airplanes) or social media or weapons (guns). Further, modern technologies span the globe, so that they exert imperative coordination over distant populations; the use of cell phones around the world is testimony to this fact. Such a critical perspective on technology can be useful in policy discussions of numerous issues affecting contemporary institutions.