It’s been a while since I last wrote but with my kids being back in school and the pandemic holding back any paid work, I’ve got some time and I thought I’d write again. Since my last post years have literally gone by and my interests have changed to reflect my growing children, who are now five and nine. So, I’m less interested in potty training and breastfeeding and more curious about education, gender and even parent’s relationships with each other (we have time for that now!). Also, since doing my MSc in Digital Anthropology* I am super interested in how we as humans make and are made by the technologies we live with. So, there’ll be some posts about that too, especially in relation to how it affects families which is basically everyone.

Living through Covid-19 has been a particularly intense time in terms of our dependence on digital technology. Who’d have thought we could become even more reliant on our smart phones than we were already? Even more monitored than we already felt we were? I spent months home-schooling via various apps and platforms and despite my reluctance have ended up using all the different video conferencing services regardless of what they do or don’t do with my data. 

It’s also revealed how massively social human beings are. All those months unable to socialise, congregate, generally be near each other was and continues to be super tough. Economists, psychologists, behavioural scientists – all the people the government tend to turn to are more comfortable thinking of people as individuals motivated by individual desires. What the pandemic has shown, which has been of no surprise to anthropologists, is that we can’t understand why people do the things they do without thinking about the groups they’re a part of and the contexts they live in.  

And speaking of groups and connection, I look forward to chatting to anyone who comes by the blog or the Facebook page. I’d love to hear your ideas and thoughts, or experiences you’ve had and can feed this into my own research. As before my posts will come sporadically but hopefully not too infrequently and I hope you find them worthwhile. I’m going to start by thinking less about our kids and more about our relationships with our partners.