Lifetimes: A Theory of Timescales and Life Forms

FORTHCOMING Summer 2025

At the beginning of the 21st century, many of our most well-known and dependable forms of keeping, managing, and representing time are losing their grasp on the real. Clocks cannot measure how societies speed up, or come to a standstill during crisis, modern historiography is unable to come up with meaningful narratives about mankind as[…]

Speaking with the Dead: An Ethnography of Extrahuman Experience

Published: 05/28/2024

If you tried speaking with a dead person and they gave you a clear response, how would you react? Mediums develop their minds and bodies to communicate messages from the deceased to their living loved ones, and in Speaking with the Dead, anthropologist Matt Tomlinson describes his experiences training as a medium with a Spiritualist[…]

Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be

FORTHCOMING Summer 2024

Historiographies of Game Studies offers a first-of-its-kind reflection on how game studies as an academic field has been shaped and sustained. Today, game studies is a thriving field with many dedicated national and international conferences, journals, professional societies, and a strong presence at conferences in disciplines like computer science, communication, media studies, theater, visual arts,[…]

Artificial Earth: A Genealogy of Planetary Technicity

Published: 10/26/2023

Artificial Earth: A Genealogy of Planetary Technicity offers an intellectual history of humanity as a geological force, focusing on a prevalent contradiction in the Anthropocene discourse on global environmental change: on the one hand, it has been argued that there are hardly any pristine environments anymore, to the degree that the concept of nature has[…]

Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy? Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together essays, poems, artwork,[…]

Living with Monsters: Ethnographic Fiction about Real Monsters

Published: 05/11/2023

For every generic type of monster—ghost, demon, vampire, dragon—there are countless locally specific manifestations, with their own names, traits, and appearances. Such monsters populate all corners of the globe haunting their humans wherever they live. Living with Monsters is a collection of fourteen short pieces of ethnographic fiction (and a more academically inclined introduction and[…]

Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI

Published: 03/02/2023

Before the company OpenAI publicly released their ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022, Robert Leib had been a tester in OpenAI’s beta playground for GPT-3, a powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine — a chatbot, or artificial intelligence. Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI is a series of dialogues between Leib, a continental philosopher, and GPT-3’s hive mind[…]