Launching An Elsewhere Anthropologist

In the weeks to come I'll be properly launching my new blog series, An Elsewhere Anthropologist.

My goal with this series is not to expound on the virtues of anthropology, or any academic discipline. It’s to put them into practice in interesting ways. To practice the ways of seeing the world I’ve taken from studying anthropology and put them in conversation with fiction and creativity more broadly.

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What does that eve mean?

You might want to stick around if:

• You’ve wondered what real-world lessons we can take away from thought-provoking speculative fictions (books, shows, games) and the works of creators like Ursula Le Guin.

• You find yourself drawn to the strange poetry of academic papers that read like science fiction.

• You believe that the best way to understand humanity might be to look at how we dream up our monsters, our frontiers, our anxieties and aspirations.

• You believe research and academic ideas should be shared in ways people want them, and want to explore ways this might be done.

• You've ever felt that certain places—abandoned malls, late-night diners, abandoned hotels, empty swimming pools—seem to operate according to their own laws of physics.

• You enjoy fictional vignettes exploring the weird world.

As an elsewhere anthropologist, I want to study the spaces where reality gets a little thin. My ‘field sites’ include everything from the ghost stories that emerge from airports to the folklore of climate change. I'm interested in how we make sense of the inexplicable, how we navigate spaces that don’t or shouldn't exist, and how we tell stories about the things we can't quite understand.

Think of this blog as a field journal from the edges of reality—part academic inquiry, part creative exploration, part documentation of the weird.

As any good anthropologist knows, the most interesting stories often emerge from the margins—from the spaces between categories, from the moments when our usual frameworks for understanding the world break down. That's where we'll go: attempting to map the territories that exist just beyond the edges of our maps, where there be monsters.

Welcome to elsewhere. Let's see what we find.