Department of Anthropology

Craft Beer’s Scientific Boundaries: A Black Digital Ethnography

This presentation examines scientific knowledge production, boundary-making, and race using American craft beer as a case study. Using experiences of rejection, I document the ways craft beer culture produces knowledge and boundaries for people of color. Drawing from ethnographic and virtual ethnographic research, and my own identity as a person of color, to produce what I call black digital ethnography which centers blackness in the data collection and analysis process to reveal how whiteness, maleness, and science are used to validate knowledge and produce boundaries in craft beer and beyond. I explain how boundary construction may not have been intentional, but the culture of craft beer has been set up to reproduce a certain type of member. Drawing from feminist science and technology studies, this research emphasizes the impact of the everyday boundaries produced by science in hobby spaces, the research complicates the cultural boundaries that produce a lack of diversity in STEM fields beyond the simple “pipeline problem” explanation. I connect the above themes with two other research projects that focus on NAGPRA and Indigenous epistemologies, and Ojibwe food sovereignty and wild rice production. ​

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