Lifted from the comments, Elizabeth Weiss attends the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association:

What she finds, it turns out, is in large part a gathering of the pretentious and neurotic, the casually incompetent, and the ideologically addled. Among whom, audio recordings of interviews are equated with colonialism and strip-mining, and therefore neglected in order to disavow an “extraction mindset,” and for whom “scepticism is violence” and “asking for evidence… plays to ‘right-wing pundits.’” Oh, and among whom, “anthropology of the self” is The New Hotness. Yes, these titans of rigour and fearless enquiry.

Via Darleen.

Because it’s Monday, that’s why:

Dawn Luebbe’s short documentary about the Dress A Cow event at Ohio’s Canfield County Fair.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

As respite from our usual programming, and because some newcomers may have missed it, I thought I’d repost this short film by Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

At Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, a panel of journalists and media professionals declare their priorities. 

The full two-and-a-half-hour video, which begins with a land acknowledgement and rumblings about “settlers” and their “racial guilt,” and “white supremacist colonial mindsets which we have internalised both collectively and individually,” can be endured here. 

Following this lengthy declaration of innate racial wrongness, the panellists begin to ruminate on “how best to confront the corrosive force of online hate targeted at journalists.” Being a journalist on Twitter, where the public can talk back, sometimes bluntly, is equated with surviving in an active warzone and other “hostile physical environments,” with women, the majority of the panel, apparently hardest hit. Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on Twitter. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Lifted from the comments, a thrilling development:

Because “gender fluid” and “bigender” employees should have “multiple pass-cards with different forms of gender expression or linked email accounts / intranet accounts with different names and photos.” You see, “workplace equality” will apparently be enhanced by enabling “non-binary employees to have their identities recognised on all employee-facing workplace systems.” And by introducing confusion and farce into the workplace, along with security complications and a kind of obligatory collective pretension. Such that employees may be unsure of which make-believe “identity” a colleague is inhabiting on any given day and, consequently, which email address to use in order to avoid complaints or claims of being oppressed.