MIT Department of Anthropology

Past Events

MIT Anthropology

Past Events

Apr 10, 2023

Dr. Laurence Ralph Colloquium: "Juvenile Murder, Vengeance, and Grief"

Dr. Laurence Ralph

Princeton University

Monday, April 10, 2023 4:00 - 5:30 PM 14S-130, The Nexus, Hayden Library

This talk will examine the ramifications of juvenile incarceration. A central focus of my discussion will be juvenile murder, as I discuss two separate, yet interrelated, cases in which teenage boys of color were killed by their peers. I ask: How does a victim’s family heal from homicide?

Apr 6, 2023

MIT Anthropology Book Party! 

Thursday, April 6, 2023 4:00 - 6:00 PM Salon West, Samberg Center

Celebrating works by: Manduhai Buyandelger | Stefan Helmreich | Amy Moran-Thomas | Heather Paxson |  Bettina Stoetzer

JOIN US!

April 6th , 4 - 6pm, Salon West, Samberg Center

Apr 5, 2023

Anthro Tea!

Wednesday, April 5, 2023 4:00 - 5:00 PM E53-335

Come relax with us and enjoy some fun conversation: no need to RSVP!

Mar 22, 2023

Anthro Tea!

Wednesday, March 22, 2023 4:00 - 5:00 PM E53-335

Come relax with us and enjoy some fun conversation: no need to RSVP!

Mar 13, 2023

Colloquium: Dr. Michael J. Hathaway "Forays in Decolonizing Biology:  Thinking about What Mushrooms Live For"

Dr. Michael J. Hathaway

Simon Fraser University

Monday, March 13, 2023 4:00 - 5:30 PM 14S-130, The Nexus, Hayden Library

In this talk, Michael will provide an introduction to his latest book, What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make, which was just published by Princeton University Press. For this STS and Anthropology-oriented audience at MIT, he will explore how we might explore the legacy of Enlightenment thinking and the English language in shaping the emergence of the discipline of biology.

Mar 8, 2023

Anthro Tea! 

Wednesday, March 8, 2023 4:00 - 5:00 PM E53-335

Come relax with us and enjoy some fun conversation: no need to RSVP!

Mar 1, 2023

Stefan Helmreich MITx Panel "Encouraging Students to Share their Perspectives & Questions on Course Topics" 

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM 36-144

MIT Open Learning Residential Education xTalks:  Learn how colleagues foster a community where students share different perspectives and ask questions to further their learning, and what digital tools support these efforts.

  • Stefan Helmreich, Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, who will share his experience in 21A.500, 21A.303, 21A.505.
  • Maxine Jonas, Senior Lecturer in Biological Engineering, and Biological Engineering Communication Lab Fellow, who will share her experience in 20.309.

Residential Education staff will be available to share technical and pedagogical practices to support student learning. Attendees are welcome to participate in Q&A, and share their experience.

Feb 22, 2023

Anthro Tea! 

Wednesday, February 22, 2023 4:00 - 5:00 PM E53-335

Come relax with us and enjoy some fun conversation: no need to RSVP!

Feb 8, 2023

Anthro Tea!

Wednesday, February 8, 2023 4:00 - 5:00 PM E53-335

Come relax with us and enjoy some fun conversation: no need to RSVP!

Dec 13, 2022

MIT WGS "Articulating Abortion" Series: Abortion Rights as Human Rights: The Continuing Fight for Reproductive Justice

Zakiya Luna, Dean's Distinguished Professorial Scholar

Department of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis

Tuesday, December 13, 2022 4:00 - 6:00 PM  3-133

The Women's & Gender Studies presents the year-long Articulating Abortion series. It is with great honor we will welcome Professor Zakiya Luna to MIT campus. Professor Luna will defend reproductive rights as human rights.

Nov 28, 2022

Xenia Cherkaev Book Talk "Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice" 

Xenia Cherkaev

Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg

Monday, November 28, 2022 4:00 - 5:30 PM 14S-130, The Nexus, Hayden Library

Xenia Cherkaev will speak about her forthcoming book Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice (Cornell UP 2023). The book tells a radically new story of how the Soviet system functioned and why it failed. Mediating between today’s popular narratives of “Soviet times” and the ownership categories of Soviet civil law, it shows the Soviet Union as an explicitly illiberal modern project, reliant in theory and fact on collectivist ethics. A historical ethnography, its narrative begins in the 2010s with former Leningrad residents’ stories of gleaning industrial scrap from worksites. Placing these stories in conversation with Soviet legal theories of property and with economic, political and social history, this book shows the Soviet Union as a “socialist household economy,” whose members were guaranteed “personal” rights to a commons of socialist property rather than private possessions. It traces the development of such “personal” rights though three historically significant turns – during the 1930s, 1960s and 1980s – and shows how the Soviet project unfolded in dialogue with contemporaneous neoliberal thought in one overarching debate about the possibility of a collectivist modern life.

Oct 27, 2022

Cross-STS Series: "Food, Farms, and Factories: Transformations of the Industrial?"

Thursday, October 27, 2022 4:30 - 6:00 PM E51-095

with Alex Blanchette, Tufts Anthropology, and Deborah Fitzgerald, MIT STS

Join us for a roundtable discussion as we explore what makes industrialized food production so enduring. Together, we will think through agricultural pasts and futures, with an eye toward the ethics of making and eating food on a climate-changing planet.

Oct 26, 2022

AAA Anthropology Live: Online Event Series "The Stories We Tell — The Southeast Chicago Archive & Storytelling Project"

Wednesday, October 26, 2022 3:00 - 4:00 PM Virtual

The Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project uses objects and stories donated by diverse residents of a former steel mill community in order to explore the transformation in what it means to be “working class” in the United States. This digital project includes mini-documentaries or interactive “storylines” created from these donated objects. The storylines explore such topics as experiences of immigration, historic union conflicts, the social impact of the mill closings, and environmental activism in a contemporary deindustrialized landscape. The discussion will focus on The Memorial Day Massacre storyline which explores one of the most famous events in U.S. labor history in which ten strikers were killed by Chicago police in 1937.

Oct 24, 2022

Fall 2022 Speaker Series: Mitali Thakor (HASTS '16), Artificial Intimacies: Eldercare Robots and Animate Companionship

Mitali Thakor, PhD. (HASTS '16)

Wesleyan University

Monday, October 24, 2022 4:00 - 5:30 PM 14S-130, The Nexus, Hayden Library

The demand for service robots has increased with the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of the primary sites for development of such robots is in eldercare nursing. Eldercare robots seem to promise a continuation of care not otherwise possible under current medical infrastructures in the US. These robots purport to stave off loneliness, provide a watchful eye to alert family members and emergency medical personnel, and enhance clients’ therapeutic care by engaging memory recall and language skill.