Susan Paulson: Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds
Coronavirus has provoked some of us to think about our worlds in new ways and to consider different horizons of change. Yet in many pandemic-related discourses and policies,…
Author: focaal_admin
Don Kalb: War: New Times
It is now becoming overly clear that this cruel and unjustifiable war in and on Ukraine is not going to last ten days – as the strategists in…
Antonio De Lauri: The idea of a clean and efficient war is a dangerous lie
The war in Ukraine resuscitated a certain dangerous fascination for war. Notions such as patriotism, democratic values, the right side of history, or a new fight for freedom…
Martin Fotta: Towards Anti-War Anthropology: On EASA, CEE and NATO
One of the casualties of Putin’s war on Ukraine will be European critical social science. While the war has instigated important discussions about ‘US-plaining’, ‘Westplaining’ and about Russian…
Alexander W. Anthony: Covid in the confines of the US
Introduction There is a calendar in my office which still hangs at March 2020; an artifact of the confusion and rush to ‘lockdown’ and to find shelter from…
Andrew Orta: The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear
Responding to a question about future of the MBA (Master of Business Administration) in the wake of the pandemic, the Dean of a top program recently suggested that…
Don Nonini: Scoring the U.S. Working Class: Expropriation and Digitalization
Introduction Working-class people in the United States are now at a turning point – whether to compliantly return to the pre-Covid conditions capital set for them, or to…
Ieva Snikersproge: Jobs or ecology? Why green growth is a pipe dream and how the pandemic could change this
My interest in the tensions between job preservation and ecological transition comes from my fieldwork among neorurals in Diois, a relatively isolated mountainous area in Southeastern France. The…
Andrew Flachs, Ankita Raturi, Juliet Norton, Valerie Miller, and Haley Thomas: Building back bigger or degrowing local food? US alternative food networks and post-corona agrarian economies
There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of…
Sandy Smith-Nonini: Energy Crises in the Time of Covid: Precarious Fossil Infrastructures
The spectacle of Russia invading Ukraine has elevated tensions over Europe’s access to natural gas and may herald a sea-change in regional geopolitics of energy. But prior to…
Marc Edelman: Encirclement: Historical Roots of Putin’s Paranoia
“What’s going on inside Putin’s head?” “He’s insane.” Questions and declarations like these pepper discussions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While insanity appears an obvious — albeit broad…
Chris Hann: The Agony of Ukraine
After nearly two weeks of violent conflict in Ukraine, it is increasingly difficult to stand back and see the bigger picture. The West has lined up behind the…
Gavin Smith: Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour
Matan Kaminer’s reflections on the workshop, “Rethinking surplus populations” is full of interesting insights and challenging puzzles. As he says, “operationalizing this concept [surplus populations]…
Andrew Sanchez: Work is Complicated: Thoughts on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs
There’s a Committee for Committees! A few weeks ago, I received a message from a colleague. It was the sort of funny thing that one friend says to…
Elizabeth Cullen Dunn: When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism
The invasion of Ukraine has been a shock not just to Eastern Europe, but to the post World War II international order. While the fundamental tenets of postwar…
Don Kalb: “Fuck Off” versus “Humiliation”: The Perverse Logic towards War in Europe’s East
Image 1: Czar Vladimir, by BakeNecko. I like the tone and the global historical perspective of David Harvey’s FocaalBlog article. Harvey’s socialist internationalism versus competitive nation-…
Derek Hall: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Response to David Harvey
David Harvey’s February 25 FocaalBlog post is presented as “An Interim Report” on “Recent Events in the Ukraine”. Harvey’s essay effectively covers some of the core forces that…
David Harvey: Remarks on Recent Events in the Ukraine: An Interim Statement
Image 1: Young girl protesting the war in Ukraine, photo by Matti. David Harvey prepared this text for the 2022 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. We publish…
Massimiliano Mollona: Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism
One of the lowest moments of my undergraduate studies in Economics back in the 1990s happened whilst reading Tom Peters’ Liberation Management (1992), where the management guru/McKinsey-associate pro…
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bullshit Jobs
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussants: Massimiliano Mollona & Andrew Sanchez When David Graeber published his article ‘On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs’ in Strike! in 2013, he knew he st…
Michael Herzfeld: The Slyness of Stupidity: A Commentary on David Graeber’s “The Utopia of Rules”
David Graeber’s wide-ranging – and, appropriately, sometimes wildly swashbuckling – set of essays sketches his anarchist utopia by default, as a social world free of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, he…
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bureaucracy
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussant: Michael Herzfeld If the previous week in our series focused on the imagination, this week considers what for David Graeber was its antithesis: bureaucracy.…
Michael Edwards: Graeber, Leach, and the Revolution in Myanmar
I would never have expected Ruth to join the revolution. But then so much of what’s happened in Myanmar this past year has been somehow unexpected, from the…
Matan Kaminer: Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop
I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part…