I have to start by saying that writing an introductory post feels awkward and cringe. I generally dislike talking about myself (I know, a rarity for academics) and like to keep things focused on my work. But I do think it’s important to say a little bit about who I am and why I’m writing here in what I’m considering a sort of public notebook.
After I introduce myself, I want to explain a bit about what this blog is for, why I am starting it now, and what I hope it can grow into.
Who Am I?
My name is Will, I am a sociocultural medical anthropologist. I’m currently faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Memphis. You can get details about my academic record from my CV on my main website, so I won’t go into the nitty gritty details here. But generally speaking, my work has existed at the nexus of critical medical anthropology, queer/trans studies, and science and technology studies, though recently I have been expanding into other areas including the arts (especially performing arts) and health as well as critical AI studies.
Academically, I am interested in how culture and history shape norms and experiences of bodies, genders, sexualities, and communities, including how norms around those issues are produced and reproduced in American society. I have centered the needs and concerns of LGBTQ+ people across my work, which has taken place in clinics, medical schools, incarceration settings, and theaters. On a more personal level, I am a white queer person in my 40s who enjoys music, gaming, writing, hanging out with my dogs (photos of them are on my Instagram if you are curious), and spending time with friends and family (both natal and chosen).
Way back in the 2010s, I was a writer and site editor on Skepchick and its subsite Queereka, where I often wrote about gender and sexuality issues from an anthropological perspective. That was about the extent of my involvement with the skeptic/atheist movement of that time, and I found myself increasingly disgusted by the rise of misogyny, transphobic bigotry, Islamaphobic racism, and right-wing extremism in that movement, which I saw first-hand get directed at my friends on a constant basis. As I got eyeballs deep in working on my PhD in 2015, I backed away from writing for the site because I couldn’t give it the time it deserved anymore. Shortly after, the movement basically fell apart, and though I am still an atheist and follow principles of skeptical humanist freethought, I think that movement became a massive clusterfuck that helped usher in the rise of fascism in the US.
I learned a ton about writing for general audiences while at Skepchick, but one of the things that I disliked immensely was dealing with anonymous commenters posting bad-faith stuff in the comment sections of posts there. I spent way too much time fighting with (and and throwing shade at) commenters on there. That is not something I am interested in doing here. For now, I am leaving the comments off on my Notebook, but I am open to the idea of allowing comments on posts later, though they would be heavily moderated and I will not engage with anything I perceive as being in bad faith.
What is this Notebook for?
I am treating this space as my public notebook where I’ll share things that don’t have a home anywhere else. This might include:
- Unpublished manuscripts – pieces that aren’t fit for peer review for any number of reasons but that I still think are worth sharing
- Musings on academic life – there’s a lot going on in academia that people outside of the institution often don’t know about or hear about but don’t understand context, so I hope to sometimes share some of those insights here when appropriate
- Thoughts/analysis of current events through an anthropological lens
- Updates on my research projects as they develop in real time
Over time, I hope to grow beyond just text posts by beginning to create videos, maybe a podcast, and I’d love to start doing interviews with people across a range of topics I care about–not just other academics, but community organizers, artists, clinicians, and anyone else doing things I find interesting.
Why Bother? And Why Now?
As a discipline, anthropology is generally pretty bad at talking to the public. There are a handful of folks that I think really excel at this (Paul Farmer and Augustin Fuentes most immediately come to mind), but I almost never see anthropologists on podcasts or news media offering commentary and analysis on important things to the public.
Anthropologists produce amazing work that is incredibly useful for understanding why people (both today and in the past) do the things they do, believe the things they believe, and live the way they live. As a sociocultural anthropologist, I focus on the sociocultural side of things, but I am trained as a four-field anthropologist (meaning I have had graduate-level training in all four subfields of American anthropology, including sociocultural, linguistic, and biological anthropology as well as archaeology) so I can speak broadly to many issues around what it means to be human. That said, I do not claim expertise in any of those other three subfields, though there are specific areas within those subfields (like biological and linguistic issues around health and sex/gender) that I can claim some expertise on. I strive to be honest and work in good faith, so when there are times I am writing or communicating outside my expertise, I will work hard to flag that and offer links to other folks’ work as appropriate.
At any rate, I think it is a real shame that anthropologists have been pretty terrible at communicating with the public, and I’ve long wanted to put my money where my mouth is, especially since I finished my PhD in 2021. Now that I am going up for tenure soon and have started working on a more public-facing project than my dissertation work, I feel it is a good time to start putting some focus back on my public communication and to get comfortable again with this particular genre of scholarly writing.
Why now? Well, 2026 feels like an especially urgent time to rekindle this practice. Things are bleak on so many fronts, and it can be real easy to just stick our heads in the sand. But we’re living through what I think is the fall of the American Empire (for better or worse) and the institutionalization of fascism in the US (no better side on that one). Education at all levels is under direct attack by fascists because they know having educated citizens is a threat to those in power because such citizens are more difficult to convince using the simplistic narratives fascists depend on to convince the populace to support them. More specifically, there is an international and coordinated movement attacking LGBTQ+ people through legislation and policies intended to push us back into the closet at best or erase us from existence at worst. That is combined with the scapegoating of immigrants and other minority communities such as Muslims in the US. Anthropologists have a lot to say about these things, but we just tend to say them amongst ourselves, and that is a huge loss for society because anthropology at its core is the study (and, dare I say, celebration) of human diversity, and we have the tools to debunk and dismantle many of the claims made by fascists as they attack marginalized folks. Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, showed us 100 years ago the power of critical anthropological inquiry on important social issues such as fighting eugenics and scientific racism and welcoming women and people of color into the academy, so there is a tradition for this kind of work but unfortunately as a discipline we have dropped that ball.
So, I have a sense of urgency now to begin speaking out on these things. Though there is certainly darkness in the history of anthropology (point me to a discipline without such darkness, if you dare!), we have over a century of data documenting just how incredibly diverse humans are. Our discipline has shown the various ways humans organize communities and societies along lines of age, gender, kinship, sexuality, and labor, and that that variation isn’t something to be afraid of but to be celebrated. After all, to others, we are often the strange ones.
Anthropology has convincingly demonstrated that entire groups of humans do not deserve less dignity, safety, and respect just by virtue of having different histories and cultures. I cling tightly to that view, and it will come through in much of my work here. I hope that folks who read my writing on here will agree and join me in positioning ourselves to always be skeptical of nice, tidy explanations that align with our own cultural logics and values and put other cultures down in the process. That does not mean, by the way, that we won’t be critical or call out the harms done by people and the ways they use culture to enact those harms. I hope we can all challenge ourselves to be skeptical and critical always, and to seek out answers to our questions and solutions to our problems in good faith, together as humans stuck together on this little beautiful ball of rock we call Earth.
If there are things you’d like for me to write about or address, please feel free to use the contact form on my main website. Any emails sent to my personal or academic email addresses will be ignored (I already receive so much email on my academic email, I will just add anything from someone I don’t know to my spam filter).
