Tag: Anthropology

Analyzing the 2024 Election: How Democrats Lost the Working Class and What It Means for America’s Future

What happened in the 2024 election, and what can we expect from Donald Trump during these next four years? In our follow-up conversation, Kyle Morrison describes why Kamala Harris and Democrats lost favor among many US Americans and how US voters shifted during the 2024 election. Even though we talked in January, 2025 in the weeks before Trump was sworn into office, his predictions of what to watch out for during a Trump second term still remain salient.

He also describes what Democrats can do to win back power. Voters tend to vote based on how they feel, and he discusses how to resonate with voters in political campaigns in the current age of social media.

Kyle is an anthropologist specializing in US moderate conservative movements, particularly conservatives who do not support Donald Trump or the contemporary Republican party (sometimes also called “Never Trumpers”). He also has years of experience conducting grassroots organizing and developing consensus across competing political perspectives to promote equitable labor practices.

Becoming a Business Anthropologist: Interview with Oscar Barrera (Part 3 of 3)

In this final part of the Interview, Oscar Barrera shows how he has used qualitative insights along with quantiative data as a business anthropologist to help organizations improve their product. Talking with customers provides an invaluable way to understand their needs, mindset, and decisions.

Oscar Barrera is a Corporate Anthropologist based in Veracruz, Eastern México.  He is the CEO of Corporate Anthropology Consulting and has been working with successful companies and organizations for 8 years helping them to innovate by finding unseen opportunities to grow their businesses and improve their organizational culture. Oscar is also a keynote speaker and is the founder and host of the Podcast Nuevas Posibilidades (New Possibilities) focused on innovation and businesses. Feel free to check out his podcast here as well: https://antropologiacorporativa.mx/podcast/.

Click here to learn more about the Interview Series.

To learn more about Oscar and the sources we referenced in our conversation:

Becoming a Business Anthropologist: Interview with Oscar Barrera (Part 2 of 3)

In Part 2 of our Interview, Oscar Barrera explains how to get yourself out there in order to find clients and how he used coaching to help improve his mindset in such a way that enabled him to pursue his goals. Working through one’s current mindset through coaching can work wonders in helping people grow occupationally or personally, as Oscar attests.

Oscar Barrera is a Corporate Anthropologist based in Veracruz, Eastern México.  He is the CEO of Corporate Anthropology Consulting and has been working with successful companies and organizations for 8 years helping them to innovate by finding unseen opportunities to grow their businesses and improve their organizational culture. Oscar is also a keynote speaker and is the founder and host of the Podcast Nuevas Posibilidades (New Possibilities) focused on innovation and businesses. Feel free to check out his podcast here as well: https://antropologiacorporativa.mx/podcast/.

Click here to learn more about the Interview Series.

To learn more about Oscar and the sources we referenced in our conversation:

Becoming a Business Anthropologist: Interview with Oscar Barrera (Part 1 of 3)

In this next interview in my Series, Oscar Barrera describes how he learned to use anthropology to help businesses improve their products. In this first part, he discusses how he became a business anthropologist and how the business world has shaped his philosophy and approach to work.

Oscar Barrera is a Corporate Anthropologist based in Veracruz, Eastern México.  He is the CEO of Corporate Anthropology Consulting. He has been working with successful companies and organizations for 8 years helping them to innovate by finding unseen opportunities to grow their businesses and improve their organizational culture. Oscar is also a keynote speaker and is the founder and host of the Podcast Nuevas Posibilidades (New Possibilities) focused on innovation and businesses.  Feel free to check out his podcast here as well: https://antropologiacorporativa.mx/podcast/.

Click here to learn more about the Interview Series.

To learn more about Oscar and the sources we referenced in our conversation:

Designing Machine Learning Products Anthropologically: Building Relatable Machine Learning

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How do we build relatable machine learning models that regular people can understand? This is a presentation about how design principles apply to the development of machine learning systems. Too often in data science, machine learning software is not built with regular people who will interact with it in mind.

I argue that in order to make machine learning software relatable, we need to use design thinking to intentionally build in mechanisms for users to form their own mental models of how the machine learning software works. Failing to include theses helps cultivate the common sense that machine learning is a black box for users.

I gave three different versions of this talk at Quant UX Con on June 8th, 2022, the Royal Institute of Anthropology’s annual conference on June 10th, 2022, and Google’s AI + Design Tooling Research Symposium on August 5th, 2022.

I hope you find it interesting and feel free to share any thoughts you might have.

Thank you for the conference and talk organizers for making this happen, and I appreciate all the insightful conversations I had about the role of design thinking in building relatable machine learning.

Trash Data Science: Garbology, Anthropology, and Spatial Data Science – Conversation with Gideon Singer (Part Four)

Here is the fourth and final part of my interview with Gideon Singer, Director of Spacial Data Science at Litterati, for my Interview Series. He describes the strategies he uses to collect data as a garbologist and data scientist.

Here is Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of our interview.

Gideon Singer is an applied anthropologist in the business of exploring societies through the waste, litter, rubbish, and other detritus they leave behind. As a self-proclaimed digital garbologist, his work juxtaposes digital ethnography with archaeology and spatial data science.

Resources:

Trash Data Science: Garbology, Anthropology, and Spatial Data Science – Conversation with Gideon Singer (Part Three)

Here is the third part of my interview with Gideon Singer, Director of Spacial Data Science at Litterati, for my Interview Series. He discusses how the interconnections he has found between data science and garbology.

Here is Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4 of our interview.

Gideon Singer is an applied anthropologist in the business of exploring societies through the waste, litter, rubbish, and other detritus they leave behind. As a self-proclaimed digital garbologist, his work juxtaposes digital ethnography with archaeology and spatial data science.

Resources:

Trash Data Science: Garbology, Anthropology, and Spatial Data Science – Conversation with Gideon Singer (Part Two)

Here is the second part of my interview with Gideon Singer, Director of Spacial Data Science at Litterati, for my Interview Series. He describes garbology is and what kind of work he does as a data scientist garbologist.

Here is Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4 of our interview.

Gideon Singer is an applied anthropologist in the business of exploring societies through the waste, litter, rubbish, and other detritus they leave behind. As a self-proclaimed digital garbologist, his work juxtaposes digital ethnography with archaeology and spatial data science.

Resources:

Trash Data Science: Garbology, Anthropology, and Spatial Data Science – Conversation with Gideon Singer (Part One)

I interviewed Gideon Singer, Director of Spacial Data Science at Litterati, for my Interview Series. He discusses his mission to combine garbology, anthropology, and data science to better understand humanity and the trash we leave behind. In this first part, he describes the connections he has found between these various fields.

Here is Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of our interview.

Gideon Singer is an applied anthropologist in the business of exploring societies through the waste, litter, rubbish, and other detritus they leave behind. As a self-proclaimed digital garbologist, his work juxtaposes digital ethnography with archaeology and spatial data science.

Resources:

Applying Computational Ethnography and Statistics to Vapor Wave: Interview with Tanner Greene (Part 2 of 2)

Here is the second part of three in my conversation with Tanner Greene. He discusses his strategies for transitioning from graduate school to UX research and his recommendations for any fellow student seeking to do the same.

Here is Part 1 of our interview.

Tanner Greene is a UX Researcher and Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Virginia, where he’s finishing a dissertation on the history of vaporwave, a music genre created on social media platforms. Tanner’s interests straddle math and the humanities, spanning digital cultures, user metadata, and a long-dormant statistics ability he wants to revive. In his spare time, Tanner enjoys writing about music, playing video games, and dreaming about learning SQL.

Resources We Referenced:

For more context on my interview series in general, click here.