Paper short abstract:

AnthroDorphins is a new website and YouTube channel (@anthrodorphins) which uses multimodal approaches to create short videos aiming to enliven cultural anthropology for students, facilitate communication between researchers, and invite general audiences into a community of shared knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the ethical call for accessibility from the AAA, a significant amount of anthropological research remains inaccessible–often written in exclusionary language and even then behind paywalls. The scholarly community and the public could benefit from an inclusive and comprehensive network of shared anthropological knowledge to promote the varied and complex work by anthropologists and those using anthropological methods and theories. Meanwhile, millions of people seek information of all kinds on Youtube every day; it’s one of the most democratic and accessible platforms for knowledge sharing around the world yet one that has been largely overlooked by even translational anthropologists. AnthroDorphins, a new cultural anthropology video channel has recently launched and is still developing. The site aims to bring the field to new and diverse audiences and serve as an engaging teaching resource for the anthropological community and the general public. Building off an established visual and multimodal ethnographic practice in visual psychological anthropology, the videos seek to balance emotional engagement, visual interest, and theoretical knowledge through original material and that carefully curated from pre-existing available media. This paper will address the origins of the channel, its current iteration, and its vision for using open source social media technology to connect a wide network of anthropologists with each other and the public.