Visiting Professor of Anthropology, Colby College
he/him
Prior to arriving at Colby in 2025, Joshua D. Rubin taught for ten years at Bates College. While at Bates, he won the college’s Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.
His research examines the representational boundaries of violence, paying particular attention to the conditions in which presentations of violence are taken as dangerous or not. To date, his work has focused on three domains of social life that feature highly ambiguous presentations of violence: sports, video games, and art. His first book, Animated by Uncertainty: Rugby and the Performance of History in South Africa (University of Michigan Press, 2021), examines how rugby became a became a terrain for colonization–both by the colonial state and by the militant white masculinity of apartheid-and how anti-apartheid activists and the post-apartheid state attempted to contest this colonization and advance alternative political projects. In this framing, rugby is not a symbolic representation of struggles happening elsewhere. Rather, it is a world of its own, which demands conceptual and embodied adaptations from the humans who encounter it. Rubin’s second book project further extends this interest in representation and violence. This project, Feeding the Loop, is an ethnography of the roles that user research plays in the construction in the virtual worlds of video games. It is also under contract with University of Michigan Press.
In addition to these major projects, he has also published on contestations around artistic autonomy in Zimbabwe. His book chapter on the politics of the NFL Rulebook was released in the edited volume “Not Playing Around: Intersectional Identities, Media Representation, and the Power of Sport” (2022). Further work has appeared in the journals SAFUNDI, Cultural Anthropology, Africa, and The Information Society (forthcoming).
Talks
How Video Games Work
This presentation introduces the complexities of video games as a medium. Its goal is to prepare audiences to think carefully and critically about video games they encounter in the world and to better identify how games interact with, and work on, their players. Some topics considered in this presentation include video game violence, accessibility in gaming, game design and game mechanics, and the politics of representation in video game worlds.
The Politics of Rugby in South Africa
Viewers of the film “Invictus” will know something of the political importance of rugby in South Africa, particularly its role in the country’s transition to a non-racial democracy. This presentation, based on over 10 years of research, adds significant complexity to this story. It takes rugby’s significance beyond flags, anthems, and political leaders and into the lives of South Africans who viewed rugby as a core part of their struggle against white supremacy and who continue to find political meanings in rugby today, in South Africa’s post-apartheid present.
Structures of Feeling: Understanding the Feelings That Shape our Choices and the Choices that Shape our Feelings
It is widely recognized that we are presently living through a moment of profound social upheaval. What does this moment feel like and how do our feelings of this moment shape our behavior? In this presentation, socio-cultural anthropologist Josh Rubin introduces participants to an exciting concept in social theory called ‘structures of feeling’–simply put, how the conditions in which we live produce patterns in our feelings and emotions. With the aid of straightforward examples and comprehensible language, this presentation will show how attendees can use this concept to name their feelings more precisely, identify the social conditions that produce those feelings, and to act more intentionally in response to those feelings when they are felt. This presentation is an extended version of one that was given at the Maine Humanities Council’s 2024 Big Question event.