"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.