The steel industry in the U.S. shrank dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s, with profound effects on the country’s industrial workforce. Suddenly, blue-collar workers who had spent their careers in the mills — often as part of multigenerational steelworking families — found themselves unable to earn a living as communities around them suffered and people lost the middle-class lives they had been fashioning. That process was chronicled in MIT anthropologist Christine Walley’s 2013 book “Exit Zero,” a case study of her own father’s travails as a southeast Chicago steelworker whose employer shut its mill in 1980. Walley’s husband, Chris Boebel, a filmmaker by training and media development director for MIT Open Learning, directed a documentary by the same name.

"At MIT, Lia pushed herself into challenging scenarios as she strove to first understand and then to help correct some of the profound inequalities embedded in the U.S. heath-care system."

The gray oximeter sitting on my kitchen table looks like a record player. A product of the 1970s, its alarm for low blood oxygen levels is set by analog dial. I bought it on eBay late last year, after writing a story about the racial bias built into oximetry for the Boston Review. A professor of medicine at Yale, Meir Kryger, reached out afterward with a suggestion: I should also look into the models predating contemporary pulse oximeters, specifically one made by Hewlett-Packard. It’s a technological dinosaur, but in certain ways, its inner workings are more advanced than many devices that measure blood oxygen in hospitals today.

MIT scholars are helping to solve the economic, cultural, and political dimensions of the world’s energy and climate challenges.

What might scholarly search look like if it privileged values of pluralism and critique? Relata, an experimental search tool based at MIT and developed in cooperation with Society for Cultural Anthropology, centers not individual works but the analytical moves or relations between them.

MIT anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas reflects on the deep connection.

“When I think of health now, I think of the disarray in bigger ecosystems and infrastructures that is also landing in human bodies.”

Christine J. Walley, professor of anthropology at MIT and member of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, explores how robots have often been a symbol for anxiety about artificial intelligence and automation. Walley provides a unique perspective in the recent research brief “Robots as Symbols and Anxiety Over Work Loss.”

In the midst of Covid-19’s unfolding and unequal death tolls and of ongoing police, state, and everyday violence against Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous communities in the United States and elsewhere, we in MIT Anthropology stand against racist white supremacy, believing, with anthropologist Leith Mullings, that "anthropology is uniquely positioned to make a decisive contribution to the critical interrogation of contemporary racism...

"In shamanic rituals and in computer-mediated virtual reality, a mask conceals one identity to reveal new possibilities. Seen in this light, virus protection masks offer an opportunity to replace a visage of fear with a public expression of strength as a community."

— Manduhai Buyandelger, Associate Professor of Anthropology

Graham Jones and Stefan Helmreich are two of the thirty-one MIT instructors awarded.

The mask is one of the most important human artifacts in all of anthropology. It is a tool of transformation that allows its wearers to transcend themselves, taking on timeless roles in ritual dramas. Repositories of power, masks are sacred objects, crafted with ingenuity.

Amah Edoh, associate professor in anthropology, has received the Everett Moore Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Post-doctoral Fellow Héctor Beltrán is interviewed for Data and Society's series, "#unsettle: Strategies for Decolonizing Tech Research".

Associate Professor Amy Moran-Thomas is the recipient of a 2020 James A. and Ruth Levitan Prize. The prize is awarded to instructors in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) in recognition of their outstanding contributions to research.

Associate Professor Amy Moran-Thomas' research is featured on MIT News. Her research on the global diabetes epidemic is the focus of her new book, Traveling with Sugar (Univ. of CA Press).

Associate Professor Graham Jones and Seth Riskin, Manager of the MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery, are offering a new class, Paranormal Machines: Technologies of Enchantment in Science, Art, and Culture. The class "explores the human experience of the disconcerting and the uncanny in relation to technology" and how "people and cultures build stories and beliefs around out-of-the-ordinary experiences".

Professor Heather Paxson shares her thoughts on why anthropological methods are "uniquely suited for studying the effects of automation and digital technologies in social life".

Ankita Reddy, a graduating double major in Anthropology and Biology, will begin her post-graduation life as a researcher at the start-up E25Bio continuing the work on a globally deployed diagnostic device for mosquito-borne illnesses that she worked on as an undergraduate.