Humanitarian Techniques of Trust
“Trust in humanitarian action” was the top item on the agenda of the 33rd international conference of the Red Cross movement which took place in Geneva in December…
Author: Julie Billaud
Coronavirus: Less Humanitarianism, More Politics!
This essay was written seated on my couch, trying to make sense of the contemporary ‘state of emergency’ as the world around me has gradually come to a…
Muslim Humanitarianism: An Afterword #MUHUM
What kind of practices, forms of moral reasoning and ethical orientation does Muslim humanitarianism entail? In what contexts and in response to what social problems does it arise?…
51 essential rules for doing research
Be free. Eat sweets. Do not go to university (but use the university to print for free). Resist academic hierarchy. Do not believe what professors say. Doubt, always.…
Call for #Reviews: #AnthroState #Africa
As we start into 2018, we seize the opportunity of this post by Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan on their influential edited volume States at Work to…
First (Virtual) Meeting on Meeting (MoM) #bureaucracy
This summer, Allegra has been particularly inspired by the intricacies of global bureaucracies. Our readers may have already read the report of the workshop ‘The Bureaucratization of Utopia̵…
Second (Virtual) Meeting on Meeting (MoM) #bureaucracy
This is part two of our virtual Meeting on Meeting. Read the Minute of our First MoM here. Date: 12 July 2017 Chair: Julie Billaud (JB), Director of…
The Bureaucratization of Utopia – A Report
Our students do not dream of global change anymore! It is on these pessimistic words that Alessandro Monsutti opened our workshop « The Bureaucratization of Utopia: International Governance, Audit…
The Bureaucratization of Utopia – An international Workshop
The twenty-five years since the end of the Cold War have been a historical watershed for the project of international governance embodied by the United Nations, a project…
Roundtable: Answers by Julie Billaud
Are those developments, usually condemned as corrupting us as scholars and leading to the death of pure research, introducing some kind of innovation vis-à-vis established academic work? For…
#Review: Muslim Women of the Fergana Valley
When Vladimir Nalivkin, a Russian officer who had served in several military campaigns, and his wife, Maria Nalivkina, took up farming in 1878 in the village of Nanay…
Virtual Roundtable: Julie Billaud’s response #PoliticalAgency
1. To what extent does the notion of political agency help to understand political change? I started engaging with the notion of political agency in my earlier work…
#PoliticalAgency – A Virtual Roundtable
Last May, an international workshop entitled Rethinking political agency in the Middle East: Engaging political anthropology took place in Fiesole at the European University Institute. We published b…
#Slow Week! An introduction
Those who have followed Allegra’s adventures from its creation in 2013 will probably remember that our initial motto was “Slow down!”. Prior to launching the website, Allegra’s…
Afghan Wedding Fun: Men and women’s sides!
My fieldwork in Afghanistan in 2007 involved a substantial amount of time spent at wedding parties. It was rare to spend a week without being invited to one.…
Cologne: Why cultural explanations are dangerous for feminism
The sexual assaults that occurred in Cologne on New Year’s Eve will long be remembered in Germany and in Europe more broadly. What a pity that each time…
REDUX: A Facelift & Discussion over Academic Blogging – and PLEA for support! #RELAUNCH
What is an academic blog? Who form its audience and who are, or should be, its authors? How does blogging resonate with more ‘serious’ – or at minimum…
A conversation with De-Colonizer: Research and Art Laboratory for Social Change #Palestine
De-Colonizer: Research and Art Laboratory for Social Change is a project that we, as Allegra Lab, could not ignore when doing our researches for this thematic thread on…
“We cannot give up hope” – A conversation with Gish Amit on his book #Palestine
Gish Amit is a historian who has been involved in non formal education for twenty years. He taught cinema and literature at the Arab Democratic School in Jaffa,…
Of Critique, philosophy and anthropology – An interview with Ann Stoler
The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) is a program run by The New School for Social Research for the second time this year. It brings together graduate…