In general, those blogs had no specific point and were mainly an exercise in writing every day, building good habits and hopefully writing skill. Both are debatable, as I initially stopped posting on this blog in 2012. Yay practice! I covered some reasons for that in my first "new" blog. Generally, as an academic and a fan of things have had a lot of things that I've been thinking about that sometimes intertwine but more often run parallel to what I do academically that I wanted to write about. These mainly being the pop-culture properties like TV shows, movies, and comic books, as well as other anthropological topics such as race, gender, identity and community, which are related but tangential to archaeology my anthropology subfield.
All of the entries on this blog will relate to one of the above things (mostly) and I hope to use some of these posts as the beginnings of a course I would like to teach, an introductory anthropology course that, instead of focusing on far-flung groups and 50 year old ethnographies which are often detached from students, examines the use of anthropology within science-fiction and the cultures of science fiction groups. This is modeled to a degree on Jason De Leon's Anthropology of Rock and Roll course, which presented all the necessary elements of an introductory anthropology course but looked at it through and within the lene of rock and roll. The course gave me the foundational knowledge I needed to get from an intro anthropology course and used a topic I was familiar with to keep me interested
Additionally, this blog is part of a growing conversation about archaeology, and anthropology, online and the ways we can use social media to talk about our research. It also proves that I actually do public outreach. I have a blog, I write on it, and while it might not reach millions of viewers, you never know who could be reading it and how they could be affected by my words.
