The MIT-SenseTime Alliance awarded a grant to Anthropology for a project headed up by Professor Heather Paxson. The project hopes to prototype a search tool, "Relata", which will use machine-readable metadata looking for relations among literatures, authors, and publications in anthropology. The tool will be launched on the Society for Cultural Anthropology's website.

Associate Professor Graham Jones' latest book, Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy, was given an Honorable Mention by the 2016-17 Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cutural Studies committee.

Professor Stefan Helmreich has been selected as 2018-2019 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. He will be working on his current manuscript which is an "ethnographic account of how scientists measure, model, and monitor ocean waves in an era of climate change".

Professor Stefan Helmreich joins a diverse group of scholars, scientists, and artists who have been acknowledged for their prior achievements and exceptional promise.

Professor Christine Walley has agreed to serve on the newly launched Task Force on the Future of Work which is comprised of faculty and researchers across the Institute. The mission of the Task Force is to address questions on what emerging technologies will mean for the future of work and what is the relationship between technology, work and society.

Professor Stefan Helmreich's research takes him aboard the FLIP (Floating Instrument Platform) ship to interview oceanographic scientists about contemporary wave science.

MIT News did a profile on Associate Professor Graham Jones and his views on magic as a microcosm for culture.

Professor Heather Paxson has been recognized for her community building and support of graduate students and has received a "Commitment to Caring" award from the Office of the Dean for Graduate Education.

The Oxford Companion to Cheese, published in 2016, was chosen to receive the 2017 James Beard Award for Reference and Scholarship, the highest award in the food publishing world. Professor Heather Paxson served as an Area Editor for the volume which consists of 855 encyclopedic entries on all aspects of cheese. In addition to Professor Paxson, Professors Stefan Helmreich and Graham Jones also contributed entries for the volume - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-companion-to-cheese-9780199330881?cc=us&lang=en&l.

Professor Stefan Helmreich's 2009 book, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, has been named the winner of the 2017 J.I. Staley Prize from the School of Advanced Research (SAR). The J.I. Staley Prize recognizes "innovative works that go beyond traditional frontiers and dominant schools of thought in anthropology" and which "add new dimensions to our understanding of the human species".

The screening and discussion of Professor Christine Walley's documentary on deindustrialization in the U.S. was the launch event for MIT's new initiative - Mens et Manus America - which will focus on political, social, and economic issues.

Professor Manduhai Buyandelger presented her paper, "From Secrecy to Flamboyance and In-Between: Shamanism, Migration, and Urban Life in Mongolia" at last November's Humboldt Foundation Workshop, Religion and the City: Inter-Religious Exchanges in Urban Environments, held in Berlin.

On January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump issued an executive order of extraordinary breadth restricting legally recognized refugees and the nationals of seven majority-Muslim countries (including U.S. legal permanent residents) from entry into the United States....

Professor Stefan Helmreich's book, Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016) was awarded the 2016 Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. The annual prize is given to a member whose book represents the best academic book on science, literature, and the arts.

Professor Stefan Helmreich's interview with Andrés García Molina and Julien Cossette was featured on the website of Cultural Anthropology. The interview is a follow-up to his research article, "Gravity's Reverb: Listening to Space-Time, or Articulating the Sounds of Gravitational Wave Detection", which appeared in the journal's November 2016 issue.

Lecturer Maria Vidart-Delgado discusses her course, The Anthropology of Politics, in the teachingfordisaster series on "Savage Minds", a group blog on "doing anthropology in public".

Manduhai Buyandelger's research on post-socialist Mongolia is featured in MIT News.

Professor Christine Walley's documentary, Exit Zero, has been awarded the 2015 Studs Terkel Media Prize from the Working Class Studies Association. The film which was co-directed and co-produced with Chris Boebel of MIT's Office of Digital Learning, is a moving family story about the aftermath of the closing of the steel mills in Southeast Chicago during the 1980's.

Professors Heather Paxson and Stefan Helmreich were featured in the final episode of the BBC radio 4 series From Savage to Self. This final episode of the series on the history of anthropology is on "Anthropology Faces the Future".

At the end of the Chicago Skyway, just off Exit Zero, lies southest Chicago, once a leading steel-producing region. The city’s steel mills spanned the shores of Lake Michigan, employed hundreds of thousands of workers, and fostered the growth of nearby communities. By the end of the 1980s, however, the industry collapsed and nearly every mill closed, leaving the neighborhoods with non-existent economies and toxic environments. Anthropologist Christine Walley was fourteen when the steel mill that employed her father closed. Walley narrates the personal impact of deindustrialization on her family and friends. Deep-seated feelings of cynicism and disappointment combine with hopefulness for the next generation in this quintessentially American story of a post-industrial city.