All recent posts on Carwil without Borders
“The fumes of sacrilege”: Retracing colonial theft in the Dakar–Djibouti Mission
1933: It was celebrated as a great achievement in the practice of anthropology. It was organized alongside the other organizational cornerstones of Paris’ Museum of Man (Musée de l’Homme) and under the sponsorship of the museum’s leading figures. It brought to Paris over 3,500 objects of African traditional art and religion. And in so doing,…
On deep solidarity with Iranians, and the symmetry of violence
Dissident writers, activists, and former and current political prisoners in the West have released a compelling and humane open letter to Iran’s imprisoned activists. We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced…
Where Wikipedia fits in my research life
… is the subject of this short interview segment I did at WikiConference North America 2025. The interview was with the team creating Rabbbit Hole, a documentary on Wikipedia currently in the final stages of production. But it’s also an introduction of how creating knowledge on open platforms can be part of a your research…
Following my work in 2026…
Hi! This blog has been online for nineteen years and I am not running out of things to say. However, I find myself writing and working across different venues in 2026, mostly because I’ve found that embedding data visualizations and deeper citations works better on my separate research and teaching website with the tools available…
AI is the mechanical reproduction of human thought, not a means to replace it.
I’m going to be writing a lot more about AI, among other things. In part this is because a nearly unfathomable investment is being made into this technology,. Huundreds of billions of dollars being poured into a very particular set of tools, based on the idea that AI represents a thing of essentially infinite value:…
Worse than useless: Google Gemini synthesizes pro-military fan fiction about school attack in Iran
Without a doubt, the most horrifying event of the first day of the new US–Israeli war on Iran was the air strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab (Wikipedia), in the southwestern province of Hormozgan. Video from the town show scores of adults, many of them screaming, outside the school, as smoke billows from…
Panel: “Wikipedia at 25”
I really enjoyed being a part of this panel, hosted and organized by Wiki Education. Wikipedia at 25: Authority, Legitimacy, and the Future of Knowledge Wednesday, January 14, 20269 am Pacific / 12 pm Eastern Twenty-five years ago, Wikipedia launched with the ambitious idea that knowledge could be created collaboratively and shared freely with the…
Israel 2025: Some acknowledge “Our Genocide,” while most endorse escalation
If you’ve taken a step back from the endless stream of video-documented destruction in Gaza, something even Israel-aligned political voices have been compelled to describe as “a wall of carnage,” perhaps it is time to re-engage with the political realities of the society that has waged war (at high and lower intensity) on the occupied…
On Charles McMillian, outstanding witness in the murder of George Floyd
This is Charles McMillian, who begged George Floyd to do anything to survive, and who begged Officer Chauvin to stop killing him. I love this man’s courage, his caring, his ability to put on a suit and hope that his words will matter in the trial of Floyd’s killer in the way they didn’t matter…
No Kings protests were extraordinary. How exactly?
Americans, citizens and immigrants alike, protested on Saturday, June 14, in exceptional numbers as a wave of No Kings protests became the most widespread public repudiation of the second Donald Trump administration. These protests, which were undoubtedly energized by the standoff between Los Angeles-area communities and Federal troops, could mark a turning point from isolated…
Resistance to Trump reaches its first turning point
“The Whole World Is Watching.” It’s been decades since American protesters chanted this sentence at American police in an effort to deter violence and brutality. But it has perhaps never been more true than right now. The political drama of the USA in 2025 has the world riveted, and I as I walked through the…
Trump’s authoritarian turn is everyone’s problem
It’s May 2025, and it feels like every new conversation (in my circles? in the United States? far beyond that?) needs to start with an acknowledgement of the bleak bigger picture on the national and global stage. Like every How are you? could be personal, but could also be a How are you coping with…
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About the blogger
Carwil Bjork-James is an ethnographer, photographer, writer, and participant in creative mass movements. He is assistant professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. (The views expressed here are his own, not those of the university.)
Carwil without Borders 