Elisa Sobo

Examines how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies are being integrated into higher education, using the California State University (CSU) system–and particularly San Diego State University (SDSU)–as a case study. Offers concrete recommendations for improving GenAI-related policy, training and survey design to support more effective and inclusive implementation across university settings.

Examines how AI tools are marketed to U.S. college students and how students experience AI promotions. Findings indicated a need for destigmatization, more open student-teacher exchange, and marketing literacy education supporting students in critically analyzing promotional strategies as a regular part of AI hygiene.

Explores how sound bath ritual performances reinforce narratives around trauma and stress while distracting from the structural and cultural factors that contribute to these issues. Emphasizes that this dynamic can promote a trauma-informed self-identity aligned with the American work ethic, prioritize self-care over community care, and ultimately amplify suffering rather than foster resilience.

Examines the adaptive strategies of the CommuniVax coalition in conducting emergency ethnographic research to enhance COVID-19 vaccine access and uptake. Highlights critical decision points and the necessity for flexibility in community-based research, emphasizing  a bottom-up approach and the trade-offs in decision-making.

Seeks to inspire new generations of anthropologists to revisit Bailey's seminal texts, to help them navigate their way through the ethnographic thicket of their own research.

Discuses the rise of ChatGPT and students' use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI or AI) for school assignments. Suggests ways educators can adapt to chatbot-related challenges, and reframe them as opportunities.

Delimits and discusses the cultural value of aguantarismo (agentic forbearance), as expressed among a sample of Hispanic/Latino people living/working in southern San Diego during the initial COVID-19 vaccine roll-out. Highlights aguantarismo's structural context, bypassing culture-blaming. Explories how the enduring need to ‘bear up’ corresponds with low vaccine uptake for some and high uptake for others. Demonstrates how ‘hesitant’ people can choose vaccination; non-vaccinators are not always ‘hesitant’. Underscores the multi-directional utility of cultural values like aguantarismo.

Discusses how biomedicine controls seizures for many children with epilepsy – but not all. In such cases, parents struggle in the wake of various structural, cultural, and corporeal ruptures. Continues use of ineffective medications can lead, iatrogenically, to frightening and serious symptoms and debilitations whose effects, along with those of uncontrolled seizures, ripple outward in challenging ways.

Explains that profit-boosting manipulation and subterfuge are axiomatic to late-stage US capitalism, even in healthcare. Demonstrates how acknowledgments of this can overextend into ‘false beliefs’ using data from Southern Californian parents who vaccinate selectively and those treating intractable pediatric epilepsy with cannabis; and I explore appropriate responses.

Discusses the aftermath of George Floyd’s senseless execution on 25 May 2020, in commemoration of and in opposition to countless similar instances of police brutality against unarmed Black Americans and waves of solidarity pulsing through US streets and surged internationally in protests, demonstrations, and vigils. Elaborates on how the Black Lives Matter movement is not soley about George Floyd, but involves all individuals whose lives have been lost by racisim.

Explores how parents have begun experimenting with cannabis for their children (and navigating its stigma) with little or no help from authorized experts. Finds that most participants thought highly of mainstream medicine, and took an impressively empirical approach toward developing cannabis regimens for their children.

Interviews and surveys U.S. parents with at least one child kindergarten age or younger. Finds that very few cared about or understood herd immunity, and that those who had heard of it saw it as not just unnecessary but unproven, illogical, unrealistic, and unreliable. Aims to understand how the public make use of scientific information in relation to parent role expectations and American individualism.

Surveys and interviews 53 U.S. parents with at least one child kindergarten age or younger regarding vaccine decision making, Finds that fully vaccinating parents mostly saw vaccination as routine while, in contrast, selective and non-vaccinating parents exhibited the type of self-informed engagement that the health care system recommends. Highlights that their positions on vaccination were not uniform or unilateral; rather, they were keyed to individual children's biologies, child size, environmental hazards, specific diseases, and discrete vaccines. 

Argues that anthropologists employed by the VA are responsible for some of the most important and actionable anthropologically informed health research today. Proposes that VA anthropology is in fact a generative force within anthropology as well as a vital practical pursuit.

Outlines the developmental framework underlying Waldorf education's approach and then describes how teachers put it to use in relation to the call for getting students moving.

Discusses how more U.S.-based patients than ever are traveling abroad for medical or dental services. Highlights how themes linking healthcare consumerism to culturally specific identity ideals and self-creation/representations processes dominated. Emphasizes that themes relating to the demonstration of social position, savvy expression of good consumer judgment, and achievement of libertarian ideals figured highly.