Angela K. VandenBroek, PhD Anthropologist of Innovation (and all the hype that entails)

SthlmTech, Stockholm’s startup ecosystem, is famous for being an innovation hub that produces more billion-dollar startups per capita than anywhere else except Silicon Valley. This success, people within the community say, is down to the ecosystem of organizations and experts that facilitate the creation and growth of startups via a well-organized curriculum that guides entrepreneurs through the “business” of starting-up. In this article, I examine this understanding of the ecosystem as a neutral, smooth, and ordered apparatus for maximizing the speed and efficiency of innovation. Specifically, I challenge how this popular conception of the ecosystem conceptualizes expertise and experts as mechanistic components ready to be deployed along the path of entrepreneurs training. By analyzing the expertise of ecosystem experts in practice, this paper aims to demonstrate what the ecosystem curriculum foregrounds and what it obscures and how the ideas behind this curriculum shape much more than routine business procedure.

This study examines strategies for anonymizing online data in a way that follows ethical guidelines while also retaining the fluid nature of participant engagement with social media. We explore unanticipated ethical issues that emerged as we began capturing and anonymizing social media posts for our ethnography of college students and online sociality. Using examples from our data, we illustrate our penciling technique to anonymize images for the naked eye while also considering the digital footprint. We consider methodological and ethical challenges of anonymization in a specific internet research context — user generated social media images obtained with informed consent — and explore the implications of our findings on the potential life of digital content.

The post explores the evolution and current challenges of the concept of culture in anthropology. Originating from 19th-century definitions linked to civilization and Kultur, culture has been reshaped by figures like Tylor, Boas, and Levi-Strauss. Today, culture is seen less as a unified whole and more as contested and fragmented, influenced by postmodernity's challenges. Contemporary anthropologists navigate these complexities, some seeking stability in science while others explore interpretation and description. The debate over culture's role — whether it should remain central or be de-emphasized — persists, shaping how anthropology understands human societies in a world marked by flux and diversity.