Well, this is not breaking news. The occupation of the Social Science Faculty of the HU-Berlin started last Wednesday, 18 January, but I only found out about it today. Although I work in an institute which is part of the… Read More ›
The Idle Ethnographer 
Welcome to the portable e-soapbox of a sociologist with too much time on her hands. Milena Kremakova is fascinated by too many things and refuses to devote her time single-mindedly to any one pursuit. In this column she gives voice to one of her thinking selves: that of a perpetual traveller comfortably stuck between the positions of outsider and insider, geared to discover the unusual even in the most mundane setting, and always having something to say (or show). She pledges to irregulary scribble thin, unabashedly empirical quasi-ethnographic observations, loosely driven by pre-developed concepts, while promiscuously recycling insights from sociological theories.
Sometimes she tweets short thoughts as @idlEthnographer.
Graphic ethnography
This is not news, but I found it recently, while playing around with some watercolours in my office, and thought it was exciting that someone had thought of it before me. Graphic ethnography! http://www.utpteachingculture.com/announcing-ethnographic-a-new-series/
Let’s cut the bullshit!
I study the work of mathematicians. I don’t call them informants but participants, because “informants” is a horrible word. Some of my participants enjoy being part of the research and take pains to explain and verbalise stuff to make it… Read More ›
What’s so bad about book chapters? Nothing, really.
This is a semi-personal, semi-professional post from one of our editors: I keep hearing warnings about how book-chapters are bad for your research career. Well, our current publishing and peer-review system makes so little logical sense that I’m not inclined… Read More ›
The Higher Groupthink: A Look at the Academic Spin Cycle in a Workshop
I recently attended a workshop in which some very intelligent and informed people from several countries were brought together to discuss a range of topics that had been presented in advance as a set of interconnected, open questions. Although everyone… Read More ›
Dying alone in New York
A fantastic, chilling ethnography of death in the modern metropolis – and of a life forgotten and pieced together from postmortem scraps. This text gives insights not only into the journey of a death person through a number of complex… Read More ›
Why are modern pianists so boring?
Why are pianists today so boring? The stilted way they often dress, the seriousness of performance, and even the way the whole pianist community or subculture works, is out of date. Why are pianists no longer the stars of the… Read More ›
The Destruction of Public Space
In the past few days, this bench has made an outrage among my Internet community. I had to look it up and discovered that it is a public installation by the German designer and conceptual artist Fabian Brunsing intended to… Read More ›
What is the Capability Approach about?
The capability approach (CA), developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and other social theorists is a broad, human-centred normative framework for the evaluation of individual and group well-being, quality of life and social justice. Sen and Nussbaum’s ideas have influenced… Read More ›
Maths and Girls: Sensible Solutions…
Reblogged from the Idle Ethnographer’s mathematical blog, mattersmathematical.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/sensible-solutions
Trafficked Filipino Teachers in the USA
I just read an article about something new and shocking to me – qualified teachers of mathematics (and other subjects) from the Philiphines who are recruited on one-year contracts to teach in USA public schools, but often end up in… Read More ›
Asgarda, the “Ukrainian Amazons” – and the impossibility of feminism
“Katerina Tarnovska is a Ukrainian preschool teacher, a kickboxing world champion and a self-proclaimed descendent of the legendary warrior women of the Amazon. In 2002 she founded Asgarda, a martial art exclusively for women that is inspired by the tribal… Read More ›
“A 1940’s record of a symphony written in late 19th century”: Interview with German filmmaker Moritz Liewerscheidt
“Jahrhundertwende” (“Turn of the Century”) is a thirty-minute essay film by Berlin-based filmmaker Moritz Liewerscheidt. The film reflects both the formation of Nazi ideology in the early 20th century and the situation in today’s Eastern Germany, where a neo-Nazi movement… Read More ›
Introducing a Blog: The Geek Anthropologist
I was surfing the web over breakfast (as one does) and found a fellow anthropology site bearing the cute name The Geek Anthropologist that I thought many of our readers would like. It is a community blog run by anthropology student Marie-Pierre… Read More ›
Response to comment on the post “Cite-seeing in Edirne”
This is my response to gunes’ comment on the post “Cite-seeing in Edirne” – I’m publishing it as a separate post in the hope that it will provoke further discussion. It’s an important topic. Hi gunes, Thank you for reading…. Read More ›
Cité-seeing in Edirne
3 August 2012: The Idle Ethnographer goes to Turkey One Friday morning, on 3 August 2012, the Idle Ethnographer was piled into her parents’ car, still asleep, and driven to Turkey. It must be mentioned , to avoid confusion, that… Read More ›
The Ethnographer, by Jorge Luis Borges
Below is one of Idle Ethnographer’s favourite stories about ethnographers which she’d like to share with you on her birthday, in lieu of cake. The Ethnographer Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Andrew Hurley I was told about the case in… Read More ›
A Society Carried by Ships
25 June is the international day of the seafarer. Did you know that almost 1.5 million people worldwide work on ships? Or that over 90% of all goods we use have at one point been carried on board of a… Read More ›
On which side of history? (Visual Sociology #010)
On which side of history? by the Idle Ethnographer I took this photo through the glass doors of the US embassy in Berlin. The division between East and West Berlin isn’t that stark anymore; and now I wouldn’t… Read More ›
Bulgarian elections and (banned) film “Baklava”
Baklava is a recent Bulgarian film which was banned as soon as it was released a couple of years ago due to allegations of content unsuitable for the screen, including violence, indecency and child pornography. Allegations aside, the film presents a bleak,… Read More ›
The Idle Ethnographer picks up a spade
The Idle Ethnographer is back in the field. I am doing some follow-up, and some new, interviews with maritime people in Bulgaria. Most of the previous ones were done 4-5 years ago, just before the effects of the 2008-9 financial… Read More ›
The “Communist Monopoly” Game
If you like board games, you’ll love the Waiting Game. Well, not sure that you’ll actually enjoy it (though you might!), but you’ll certainly learn something. As someone who grew up in a still socialist Bulgaria, I do remember the… Read More ›
Why did men stop wearing high heels?
Finally a good article explaining the craze of high heels with the help of some well-researched historical evidence. After years of being baffled why on earth (rather, above earth) half of the (rich) world’s population is expected (and often cherishes… Read More ›
The riddle of modern day hermits
Every now and then, people who have rejected society get caught under its radar and their solitary lives make it into newspapers. Three recent stories in the papers talked about such contemporary recluses living simple (or, rather, very difficult) lives… Read More ›
Immigration in the UK
The survey shown in the above picture shows that a large percentage of the British population is worried about immigrants coming into the country. But is it really that much of a problem? Read about the multicultural success of Slough… Read More ›
Sociology of … outer space?
I started this post as a one-sentence note about a future field called “sociology of space”. The idea came while I was reading this BBC article on some of the problems encountered the crew of a spaceship going to Mars. The article… Read More ›
Happy New Year! (Mieow!)
Always fascinating to look back into history and find out that all new things are well forgotten old ones. We don’t get tired by celebrating New Year (OK, we do, but we forget about the tiredness after a year and… Read More ›
Daddy Leave in Norway
This is the Idle Ethnographer’s share of social advertising for today. In Norway, 90% of men take their 3 months leave, while in the UK only 40% of men take the 2 week daddy leave to which they are entitled… Read More ›
Trees and happiness
A recent report unearthed an empirical link between happiness and …trees. I wonder if Christmas trees could also help us be happy? Read the article in the Guardian here.
The Woollen T-shirt Strikes Back
(reposted from 300daysinberlin.wordpress.com where the Idle Ethnographer posts not entirely sociological impressions about being a foreigner, once again) I have owned this goddamnugly woollen T-shirt since I can remember myself, and that was a pretty long time ago: some time in… Read More ›