In the early 1970s, the socialist state of Bulgaria was starting to develop a series of interconnected systems for the automated governance of different areas of social and…
Reading Don’s Value and Worthlessness (hereafter VAW)has been one of the peak experiences of my intellectual life. VAW promises to become one of the key texts in the…
In Value and Worthlessness, Kalb has set out to do something that nobody has attempted to do since the 1970s. He develops a programmatic line of Marxist research…
How do companies handle responsibilities to people and the environment when they operate abroad? What tools do they use, and what are the effects? These have been throughgoing…
It is the summer of 2022, and I am volunteering with Wes at a queer multi-purpose community space in Brooklyn, New York City. The space is bright pink,…
Anyone who knows Venezuela knows that things happen fast there. It is a function of the hectic pace of urban life in a society that is highly subject…
Suspicion appears to sit largely in the nose: we might say that something ‘stinks,’ ‘smells off,’ that we ‘smell a rat,’ or perhaps ‘something fishy.’ Such suspicious smells…
Image 1: Exú Tranca Rua (left) and Maria Padilha das 7 Encruzilhadas (right) depicted on the walls of the center. Photo by author. When I started fieldwork in…
Image 1: Gift shop window in Belgrade, May 2025, photo by Astrea Nikolovska In the mid-2010s, the tourist center of Belgrade was full of various souvenirs featuring the…
Before, times like these have come before Times when we witnessed hurricanes that never stopped uprooting trees We thought that we had learned how to travel the road to…
A Postscript Note: I finished writing this piece prior to the Israeli-US attacks on Iranian cities and nuclear facilities, which killed over a thousand people. There is, therefore,…
“History is what hurts,” stated Frederic Jameson; “it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis” (1982, 102). And the situation…
This forum has shed light on vastly different but interrelated contexts of Palestine solidarity. The essays draw attention to the interplay of shifting solidarities with Palestine and the…
One question has been haunting me since the current wave of repression of pro-Palestinian speech began in the wake of the October 7 attacks and the genocidal campaign-disguised-as-reprisal…
Extrajudicial arrest, termination from employment, suspension of university enrollment, being declared persona non-grata (Karl 2025), police violence at demonstrations, harassment at airports, online …
On 15 May 2025, Jason Hickel – economic anthropologist, leading degrowth theorist and author of popular works such as The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and…
From large cities to small towns, “No Kings Day” will counter Trump’s birthday spectacle with people power. “Nah, he wouldn’t really do that.” I’ve lived in the Upper…
Cancelling Mbembe On June 6 2024 I was present in the grand hall that is the University Aula of the University of Bergen in Norway when my friend…
“On the form, I ticked that I had got enough pads. I ticked that I had been instructed. I ticked that I had applied for microloans, more than…
One of the main strengths of ethnographic methodologies is immersed, long-term research, which enables in-depth learning and a holistic vision of a given issue. Restricted or volatile access…
An uncaring government and a gang of unscrupulous criminals. Caught between them are people regarded as expendable – people who, pushed into a desperate situation because of poverty,…
As three anthropologists working at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, Aotearoa (New Zealand), we experience anthropology in our daily work in the context of our local histories,…
This text was originally published in Swedish in Arbetar Historia (No.191-192, 2024). Special thanks to the editors for granting permission to republish. In 2015, during the peak of…
I encountered the phrase ‘in Kigali, life is expensive’ everywhere during my 15 months of fieldwork within the tech ecosystem of Rwanda. Official government figures stated that the…