https://www.andrewgilbert.com/an-anthropology-of daily 0.75 2021-04-09 https://www.andrewgilbert.com/an-anthropology-of/an-anthropology-ofalgorithms monthly 0.5 2021-04-09 https://www.andrewgilbert.com/an-anthropology-of/an-anthropology-oflandmines monthly 0.5 2021-04-09 https://www.andrewgilbert.com/an-anthropology-of/rjbh6t4f5s1sf6l7xxi10qsfib0ld7 monthly 0.5 2021-04-09 https://www.andrewgilbert.com/publications daily 0.75 2025-12-19 https://www.andrewgilbert.com/presentations daily 0.75 2026-03-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ce435d6bea1ed00016ba287/1558964652247-5MWXNMFZVOPGE4TY6U2Q/MHeiderich_ReflexionenZwei-05-copy.jpg Presentations https://www.andrewgilbert.com/teaching daily 0.75 2025-03-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/3e7efbdb-ada4-4f72-a58b-de9b7830de6f/FieldNotes-3-1709451664.jpg Teaching https://www.andrewgilbert.com/about daily 0.75 2026-02-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ce435d6bea1ed00016ba287/1558964652247-5MWXNMFZVOPGE4TY6U2Q/MHeiderich_ReflexionenZwei-05-copy.jpg About https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/72531da0-7441-4de6-844b-f71547b92177/C7FE52DC-4DFD-4D4D-B60F-F7000EA5FCD3.jpg About - I am a broadly trained sociocultural anthropologist with over 20 years of research experience, most of it in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I recently took up a position as professor of design anthropology at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany. For two wonderful years prior to this, I was a visiting professor at the Institute for European Ethnology and co-director of the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology at Humboldt University in Berlin. And before moving to Germany, I was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Senior Researcher at the University of Toronto Ethnography Lab, where I maintain an affiliation. I have degrees in Modern European History from UC Santa Cruz (BA), German and European Studies from Georgetown University (MA) as well as Anthropology from the University of Chicago (MA, PhD). In addition to Toronto, I have taught and/or supervised undergraduate and graduate students at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), and taught bloc seminars at The University of Zurich, The University of Bremen, Geneva Graduate Institute, and The University of Chicago. I currently sit on the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Anthropology and Anthropologica. I grew up in Southern California, and in a previous life was heavily involved in the DIY music scene up and down the West Coast of the United States. 2025 marked the 30th anniversary(!) of the coast-to-coast tour of my band, The Fisticuffs Bluff. https://www.andrewgilbert.com/work daily 1.0 2025-12-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/0f5ebbc6-6643-47f2-bc9f-ab2bdfde605c/DITA_prologue+05.jpg Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/3bf3dab3-c95f-4862-8ffc-efa437468ee4/Bild1.png Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/1764839698353-N75TLEKNJFIPYBIJOU7J/Screenshot%2B2025-12-04%2Bat%2B10-12-57%2BThe%2BKit%2B%25E2%2580%2593%2BMultimodal%2BAppreciation.png Projects https://www.andrewgilbert.com/work/project-three-ckng4 monthly 0.5 2025-09-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/1600915707603-D9SKBHKQ7YYWNC65N21E/Interview%252Bfor%252Bwebsite.jpg Projects - Multi-Modal and Multi-Sensory Ethnography - Graphic Ethnography From the beginning, my research on worker-initiated protests and their aftermath in the late industrial Bosnian city of Tuzla has been collaborative and interested in exploring—with others—the affordances of visual and acoustic modes of research and representation. This eventually led to a collaboration with anthropologist Larisa Kurtović and Sarajevo-based graphic artist Boris Stapić on an experimental graphic ethnography, Reclaiming Dita, currently under contract with University of Toronto Press’s ethnoGRAPHIC series. In addition to presenting this collaborative work-in-progress to various audiences in Europe and North America, we have published about the project here and here. I also teach courses in visual anthropology with a focus on sequential art, which I have written about here and here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/1600915550950-XE30D1QMXXKOH41WK7ON/Photo%2B15%2BModified.jpg Projects - Multi-Modal and Multi-Sensory Ethnography - Visual Ethnography Another example of my experimentation with visual methods of research and representation is a photo essay which I recently published with collaborator Haris Husarić. In it we seek to contribute to a visual anthropology of postsocialist industrial worker politics, pointing to new, experimental, and risky ways that workers and their supporters confront the possibilities and limits of media publicity. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/1600916181181-PE9YBOSL7IRZW6O3KKAR/snapshot.jpg Projects - Multi-Modal and Multi-Sensory Ethnography - Multi-Modal Experiments A recent experiment in multi-modal collaboration was a virtual panel I co-organized and co-produced with scholars, activists, and artists in Canada and Bosnia & Herzegovina. See this link for one example of how this could be used in teaching. And here is yet another recent experiment in short-term multi-modal collaboration I helped design at the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology. https://www.andrewgilbert.com/work/project-one-rxya8 monthly 0.5 2020-10-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/1600450458384-JKHR72UM772MKQMZI9X9/37165.jpg Projects - International Intervention - International Intervention My first major research project focuses on the practices and politics of international intervention. Drawing upon years of ethnographic field research, I seek to advance a specifically anthropological approach to the study of intervention, be it under the sign of humanitarianism, democratization, state-building, or post-war reconstruction. The most comprehensive account of my approach is laid out in my book, International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy. Encounters in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (with Cornell University Press). In it, I argue for an ethnographic analysis of international intervention as a series of encounters, focusing on the relations of difference and inequality, and the questions of legitimacy that permeate such encounters. I analyze the transformations that happen in everyday engagements between intervention agents and their target populations, and also identify key instabilities that emerge out of such engagements. The book highlights the struggles, entanglements and inter-dependencies between and among foreign agents, and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that channel and shape intervention and how it unfolds. In doing so, I reveal the open-ended, innovative, and unpredictable nature of international intervention that is usually omitted from the ordered representations of the technocratic vision and the confident assertions of many critiques. Individual articles analyze mass media as a site and instrument of intervention; the challenges aid workers face in maintaining the humanitarian status of their projects; and the dilemmas caused by the ways in which the international agents of intervention legitimize their presence and power. Over the past decade I have also taught courses that develop these themes, as well as organized conference panels and an international workshop dedicated to exploring the anthropology of international intervention. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided to this research by the International Research and Exchanges Board, American Councils, American Councils for Learned Societies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. https://www.andrewgilbert.com/work/project-two-syme9 monthly 0.5 2025-09-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/1600876865742-381EARHX68WSI4GJJ1PF/DSCN4453.JPG Projects - Political Possibility and Historical Transformation - Political Possibility and Historical Transformation I have a long-standing and ongoing interest in the possibilities and limits of intentional transformation in moments of upheaval. This is driven by the fact that most of my research focuses on Bosnia and Herzegovina, a place variously characterized as post-war, post-socialist, and post-Yugoslav – all imperfect terms that attempt to capture the kinds of historical change people must confront, shape, and resist as they navigate Bosnian politics and society. Much of my work has thus focused on the historical imagination (how people conceive of history) and its relationship with the political imagination (how people conceive what is politically possible and necessary) – both in war, in its aftermath, and in the wake of Yugoslav state socialism. Together with colleagues from Europe and North America I have sought to chart new directions for post-socialist studies, questioned the usefulness of the term post-socialism itself, and written of the inadequacies of the nostalgia concept in researching how people respond to and shape historical transformation. More recently, I have investigated the conditions that create openings and closures to political experimentation and social transformation, focusing on a series of worker-initiated protests and their aftermath in the late industrial Bosnian city of Tuzla. This has led primarily to the Reclaiming Dita project, but also includes articles on the political affordances of football fandom, and reviews, a photo-essay, and other writing on the various tactics employed by workers and their allies. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided to this research by the International Research and Exchanges Board, American Councils, American Councils for Learned Societies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. https://www.andrewgilbert.com/work/experimental-research monthly 0.5 2025-12-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/f8851a5a-8205-45ec-a696-4ea3ea1bd4d6/DCC_poster-3_A1+poster+crop.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/a7affcee-a13b-4d20-b975-7dd7d7f01397/Screenshot+2025-12-04+at+10-28-10+Workshop+%231+video+%E2%80%93+Multimodal+Appreciation.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea11e706bb0f864b2fea6e9/472098f5-b798-4fbf-9475-c965805f2b65/Untitled+design.png