Tag: Anthropology

Projects investigating Swahili, global media win SHASS Humanities Awards

Two projects — the Global Mediations Lab led by Paul Roquet and the MIT Swahili Studies Initiative led by Per Urlaub — have won Humanities Awards from the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. The pilot program, launched in fall 2023, aims to support humanities-focused, collaborative projects that can have a broad impact within SHASS or […]

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Opening the doorway to drawing

On the first Friday in November, the students of 21A.513 (Drawing Human Experience) were greeted by two unfamiliar figures: a bespectacled monkey holding a heart-shaped message (“I’m so glad you are here”) and the person who drew that monkey on the whiteboard: award-winning cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry, whose “Picture This” was a central text […]

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Rowing in the right direction

For a college student, senior Tatum Wilhelm wakes up painfully early — at 5:15 a.m., to be exact. Five days per week, by 6:20 a.m. sharp, she is already rowing on the Charles River, bursting through the early morning fog.  Between majoring in chemical engineering, minoring in anthropology, and working as an undergraduate student researcher […]

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Writing code, and decoding the world

Several years ago, MIT anthropologist Héctor Beltrán ’07 attended an event in Mexico billed as the first all-women’s hackathon in Latin America. But the programmers were not the only women there. When the time came for the hackathon pitches, a large number of family members arrived to watch. “Grandmothers and mothers showed up to cheer […]

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Micro Weddings: How to Create a Dream Wedding On a Budget

This year, the average wedding cost is $29,000. And in some cities, that number can reach as high as $35,000. But Dallas-based entrepreneur Jennifer Allen believes you don’t have to spend a fortune to make your special day one to remember. Her company, Just Elope, helps couples plan elopements and micro weddings that are both […]

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A reciprocal relationship with the land in Hawaiʻi

Aja Grande grew up on the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu, between the Kona and ʻEwa districts, nurtured by her community and the natural environment. Her family has lived in Hawaiʻi for generations; while she is not “Kanaka ʻŌiwi,” of native Hawaiian descent, she is proud to trace her family’s history to the time of the […]

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MIT SHASS Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship Program welcomes 2023-24 class

The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship program recently welcomed its 2023-24 class. The purpose of the program is to enhance diversity in SHASS and to provide fellows with additional professional support and mentoring as they enter the field. The fellowships are intended to support scholars from a wide range of backgrounds, […]

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MIT welcomes nine MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars for 2023-24

Established in 1990, the MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars Program at MIT welcomes outstanding scholars to the Institute for visiting appointments. MIT aspires to attract candidates who are, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “trailblazers in human, academic, scientific and religious freedom.” The program honors King’s life and legacy by expanding and extending […]

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Ancient Amazonians intentionally created fertile “dark earth”

The Amazon river basin is known for its immense and lush tropical forests, so one might assume that the Amazon’s land is equally rich. In fact, the soils underlying the forested vegetation, particularly in the hilly uplands, are surprisingly infertile. Much of the Amazon’s soil is acidic and low in nutrients, making it notoriously difficult […]

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SheaMoisture Men is Giving Black Men Their Flowers

Screenshot: YouTube With a line of natural hair and body products formulated with shea butter and natural oils, SheaMoisture Men is all about making men look (and smell) their best. And now they are celebrating Black men in a whole new way with a new campaign designed to make them feel good too. Small Town […]

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How an archeological approach can help leverage biased data in AI to improve medicine

The classic computer science adage “garbage in, garbage out” lacks nuance when it comes to understanding biased medical data, argue computer science and bioethics professors from MIT, Johns Hopkins University, and the Alan Turing Institute in a new opinion piece published in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The rising […]

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Dreaming of waves

Ocean waves are easy on the eyes, but hard on the brain. How do they form? How far do they travel? How do they break? Those magnificent waves you see crashing into the shore are complex. “I’ve often asked this question,” the eminent wave scientist Walter Munk told MIT Professor Stefan Helmreich several years ago. […]

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Q&A: Steven Gonzalez on Indigenous futurist science fiction

Steven Gonzalez is a PhD candidate in the MIT Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS), where he researches the environmental impacts of cloud computing and data centers in the United States, Iceland, and Puerto Rico. He is also an author. Writing under the name E.G. Condé, he recently published his first book, […]

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