M M J Fischer

Biographic Data

ID3890
NAMEM M J Fischer
GIVEN NAMESM M J
FAMILY NAMEFischer
SIGNATUREFISCHER M M J
AFFILIATIONSMassachusetts Institute of Technology
ORCID0000-0002-2871-5943
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS88
TOTAL CITATIONS1455
AUTHOR COUNT88
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1977
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX13

  • Becoming amphibious: Scientists’ Identities and Affective Relations in the Swamp of Computational Biology

    Open AccessLiron Shani, Talia Fried et al.ARTICLEScience as Culture2025Cited by: 1References: 15

  • The Kigali story, the Singapore model, and rights to the city

    Open AccessM M J FischerARTICLEJournal of the Royal Anthropologica…2025References: 1

    Bock, Stephen. 2018. Translations of urban regulation in relations between Kigali (Rwanda) and Singapore. xiii + 338 pp., figs, tables. Zurich: LIT Verlag, 2018. Hudani, Shakira E. 2024. Master plans and minor acts: repairing the city in post-genocide Rwanda. 258 pp., figs. Chicago: University Press, 2024. $32.50 (paper). Shearer, Samuel. The Kigali model: making a 21st century metropolis. Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 2017. Three recent e…

  • Laboratory Epistemologies: A Hands-on Perspective

    M M J FischerARTICLEJournal of Anthropological Research2025

  • Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life

    Open AccessM M J FischerBOOKProbing Arts and Emergent Forms…2023

    In Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life Michael M. J. Fischer calls for a new anthropology of the arts that attends to the materialities and technologies of the world as it exists today. Fischer examines the work of key Southeast and East Asian artists within the crucibles of unequal access, geopolitics, reverberating past traumas, and emergent socialities. He outlines the work of artist-theorists---including Entang Wiharso, Sally Smart, Charl…

  • Radical Egalitarianism: Local Realities, Global Relations

    Mary-Jo Del Vecchio Good, James Ferguson et al.BOOKRadical Egalitarianism2022

    In this volume, leading scholars in anthropology, religion, and area studies engage global and local perspectives dialectically to develop a historically grounded, ethnographically driven social science. The book’s chapters, drawing on research in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, are also in conversation with the extensive work of editor and contributor Stanley J. Tambiah: They all investigate some aspect of what Tambiah…

  • Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations

    Ken Anderson, Jeanette Blomberg et al.BOOKEthnography and the Corporate…2022Cited by: 1

    Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as described in this volume, raises crucial questions about potential implications to disciplines of critical inquiry such as anthropology. In addressing these issues, the contributors explore how researchers encounter and engage sites of organizational p…

  • Bacurau flies at dusk: Film, viral cultural politics, Covid-19, hauntings, and futures

    Open AccessM M J FischerARTICLEAnuário Antropológico2021References: 9

    This essay is one of a series on the arts and forms of emergent common sense in the globally interconnected, politically-semiotically-media fraught, Anthropocenic twenty-first century. The arts restlessly play hopscotch with temporalities and locations. Since the days of Third Cinema, auteur cinema, and national cinemas, films have attempted complex strategies, often mobilizing local and international genre film forms subversively against themsel…

  • Prologue: The Third Spaces of Anthropology

    Open AccessM M J FischerCHAPTEREmergent Forms of Life and the…2020

  • Anthropological Futures

    M M J Fischer, Joseph DumitBOOKAnthropological Futures2020

    In Anthropological Futures, Michael M. J. Fischer explores the uses of anthropology as a mode of philosophical inquiry, an evolving academic discipline, and a means for explicating the complex and shifting interweaving of human bonds and social interactions on a global level. Through linked essays, which are both speculative and experimental, Fischer seeks to break new ground for anthropology by illuminating the field's broad analytical capacity …

  • Shi'ism, Resistance, and Revolution

    Shaul Bakhash, Clinton Bailey et al.BOOKShi'ism, Resistance, and Revolution2019

  • The Pedagogical Work of Film for Technology Disaster Studies: Reassessing Fukushima through Film

    M M J FischerARTICLEEast Asian Science Technology and…2019

    East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal - Volume 13, Number 2, June 2019

  • Ethnography, Experimental

    Open AccessM M J FischerOTHERThe International Encyclopedia of…2018

    Experimentalism, in the sense of rethinking form to expose content (the aesthetic meaning) and creating new ways of seeing and understanding (the scientific meaning), has characterized the conceptual edge of ethnography since the 1920s, as, in turn, it has addressed cultural rationalities, postcolonial transnational capitalist relations, and visual, sonic, and electronic media. Modernist experiments from the 1920s to the 1960s were followed from …

  • A Tale of Two Genome Institutes: Qualitative Networks, Charismatic Voice, and R&D Strategies—Juxtaposing GIS Biopolis and BGI

    Open AccessM M J FischerARTICLEScience Technology and Society2018

    The journalistic stereotypes of BGI (the world’s largest sequencing centre) as a Chinese state venture, and of Singapore’s Genome Institute of Science (GIS) as a neoliberal platform, are inverted. Methodologically, by looking at qualitative networks, charismatic leaders and research strategies, this essay proposes a finer grained, meso-level, ethnographic analysis that allows for multi-scalar tracking and juxtaposition as generators of comparativ…

  • The Internet in Asia through Singapore

    C Graham, Eric Kerr et al.ARTICLEEast Asian Science Technology and…2018

    The Internet or, as these authors argue, Internets (plural) in Asia are composed of cables and exchanges, protocols and firewalls, regulations and other legal devices, making them subject to investment and governance strategies, as well as treaties and court cases. But they are also composed of figures, layers, stories, and rumors. These latter descriptors provide a heuristic framework of social features that, together with metaphors from folklor…

  • Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research

    M M J FischerARTICLEEast Asian Science Technology and…2018

    These two new books both touch on the molecular biology revolution in Asia (Singapore and South Korea in Thompson's case; Singapore and Shenzhen, China, in Ong's).Thompson provides an expert account of policy-formulation in California and justifies her all too brief forays into Asia by reference to Sheila Jasanoff's comparative work, but she provides only superficial accounts of her Asian cases which she only visited briefly -in the Singapore cas…

  • Theorizing STS from Asia-Toward an STS Multiscale Bioecology Framework: A Blurred Genre Manifesto/Agenda for an Emergent Field

    M M J FischerARTICLEEast Asian Science Technology and…2018References: 13

    East Asia and Southeast Asia provide at least four relational locales or sites of cultural critique and materials for new twenty-first-century theory construction governed by growing biological and ecological knowledge. I document a moment in East Asian and Southeast Asian STS that grounds methodological advocacy for how anthropological STS initiatives revise received models and theories and how they work from multiple and differentiated Asian si…

  • Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century

    M M J FischerBOOKAnthropology in the Meantime2018Cited by: 21

    In Anthropology in the Meantime Michael M. J. Fischer draws on his real world, multi-causal, multi-scale, and multi-locale research to rebuild theory for the twenty-first century. Providing a history and inventory of experimental methods and frameworks in anthropology from the 1920s to the present, Fischer presents anthropology in the meantime as a methodological injunction to do ethnography that examines how the pieces of the world interact, fit…

  • Afterword: Zen Exercises Anthropological Discipline and Ethics

    M M J FischerCHAPTERUnfinished2017

  • Urban Mahabharata

    Open AccessM M J FischerARTICLEMedicine Anthropology Theory2017Cited by: 3

    In this article, I take up the text of Affliction, and comment on moral engagements and sparks of references to the Mahabharata and other traditional, especially Muslim, modes of ethical thought. This commentary can be read as what in Islamic scholarship often are called 'hashiye', marginal notes on the main text. I conclude by discussing a mosaic of coverage and gaps in the contemporary ethics of Indian health care and its anthropologies

  • Anthropological STS in Asia

    M M J FischerARTICLEAnnual Review of Anthropology2016Cited by: 10References: 71

    Anthropological STS, distinct from its nearest neighbors social studies of science (SSK), social studies of technology (SCOT), and actor-network theory (ANT), is (a) more holistic and culturally embedded than those neighbors and (b) in conversation with comparative literature, film, and media studies, including imaginaries of networks beyond national boundaries. Asian STS, or theory from the Global East, rearranges theory from the Global North (t…

  • Science and Technology, Anthropology of

    Open AccessM M J FischerCHAPTERInternational Encyclopedia of the…2015

  • Understanding Shiite Leadership: The Art of the Middle Ground in Iran and Lebanon

    Open AccessM M J FischerARTICLEPolitical Science Quarterly2015

    Journal Article Understanding Shiite Leadership: The Art of the Middle Ground in Iran and Lebanon Get access Understanding Shiite Leadership: The Art of the Middle Ground in Iran and Lebanon by Shaul Mishal and Ori Goldberg. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2014. 138 pp. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $26.99. Michael M.J. Fischer Michael M.J. Fischer Massachusetts Institute of Technology Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Googl…

  • Recoiling from war again

    Open AccessM M J FischerARTICLEMedicine Anthropology Theory2015

    What have we learned in the aftermaths of wars across the Middle East as a prolegomena for a new generation of research frameworks on mental health burdens in the region? Four questions are addressed: what are the moral implications of different forms of intervention? Are there transformations in the discursive structures over the past three decades in response to experiences of war? What are the implications for mental health and social resilien…

  • Ethnography for aging societies: Dignity, cultural genres, and Singapore's imagined futures

    Open AccessM M J FischerARTICLEAmerican Ethnologist2015Cited by: 8References: 18

    Social theory generated in and about Singapore lies in psychic depths and archive fevers of an immigrant society subjected to accelerated social changes that devalue the lives of those marked by aging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Singapore, weaving together four kinds of data sets-gerontology psychiatric research and intervention; changing ritual forms; analytically phenomenological, paraethnographic theater and stories; and student vide…

  • Philosophia and Anthropologia: Reading alongside Benjamin in Yazd, Derrida in Qum, Arendt in Tehran

    Open AccessM M J FischerCHAPTERGround Between2014