Birzeit University Union: Palestinian Resistance is a Way of Being
2023 will be recorded historically as the year that Palestinians stood boldly in the face of colonial fascism and screamed in defense of their homes, humanity, and lives.…
Category: English
The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization
In her recent book, The Women of the Far Right, Eviane Leidig looks at how far-right women on social media mainstream far-right ideas and radicalise a large audienc…
Spend a Day Tracking Chimpanzees
A series of short videos captures a rare view into the lives of wild chimps through the eyes of a researcher. ✽ Some see chimpanzees as invariably belligerent…
Francisco Martinez: Keeping Things in the Dark. An Ethnography of Basements in Eastern Estonia.
Francisco gave a talk about basements in Eastern Estonia. During the last three years, has has visited thirty-seven storing spaces in different towns of Eastern Estonia to investigate…
Sharony Green, “The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
Zora Neale Hurston, an anthropologist and writer best known for her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, led a complicated life often marked by tragedy and contradictions. When…
Gerard McCarthy, “Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality, and Resistance in Myanmar” (Cornell UP, 2023)
In late 2015 Daw Aung San Suu Kyi led Myanmar’s National League for Democracy to a smashing general election victory. In one of her first public appearances since…
The Courage of Historical Truths
With the destruction of Gaza by Israel under way and the humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian territories worsening day by day, a recurrent question is raised in…
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, “Why Men?: A Human History of Violence and Inequality” (Hurst, 2023)
How did humans, a species that evolved to be cooperative and egalitarian, develop societies of enforced inequality? Why did our ancestors create patriarchal power and warfare? Did it…
Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis: on self-defence, depoliticising language, and contextualisation
On Thursday evening October 26, EU member states finally agreed to a formal declaration calling for ‘humanitarian corridors and pauses’ of the shelling in Gaza. The declaration also…
Barbara H. Tedlock, 1942-2023
Barbara Tedlock at Maya-themed holiday party, SAR Dobkin Boardroom, 2016 The School for Advanced Research is sad to report news of the death on September 11, 2023, of…
Júlia Fernandez: Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life
The algorithm swiftly gets it –yes, I am sucked in by news about Gaza- and collapses my social media platforms’ feeds into a monothematic thread that mirrors my…
We Need to Tell Our Own Stories
In the controversies swirling around Margaret Mead’s work in American Samoa, one set of voices has too often been left out: that of Samoans. Sparked by a provocative…
Gaza in the light of German Holocaust memory culture
German Foreign Minister and Green party member Annalena Baerbock announced on the 23rd of October that Germany will not support a ceasefire as demanded by the EU –…
Michael Serazio, “The Authenticity Industries: Keeping It Real in Media, Culture, and Politics” (Stanford UP, 2023)
In recent decades, authenticity has become an American obsession. It animates thirty years’ worth of reality TV programming and fuels the explosive virality of one hot social media…
On Algorithmic Divination
Scientist operating an algorithmic divination machine as imagined by Midjourney’s AI (image by Author & Midjourney). Algorithms are tools of divination.[1] Like cowry shells, scapular bones,…
Antonio De Lauri: The Courage of Historical Truths
With the destruction of Gaza by Israel under way and the humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian territories worsening day by day, a recurrent question is raised in…
Darren Byler on his book, Terror Capitalism
https://www.dukeupress.edu/terror-capitalism Interview by Xiao Ke Xiao Ke: Thank you so much for accepting my interview invitation. After reading this book in detail (again), I just want to…
Oscar Salemink (1958-2023) – a Personal Tribute
My dear friend Oscar Salemink died in Copenhagen on September 23 after a prolonged struggle with myeloma cancer. He was outstandingly generous, mischievously funny, and an indomitably social…
Verantwortungsbewusstsein – On German Responsibility
For many years now we have met Germans who declare that they are ashamed of being German. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed…
The Dirt
Discard Studies is an interdisciplinary field of research that takes systems of waste and wasting as its topic of study, including but beyond conventional notions of trash and…
Neil Cohn, “Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension” (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Drawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really, and how universally are…
I’ve won a prize: Women’s History Network Independent Researcher Grant
The best thing about this award is the fact that someone like myself can qualify at all. The Women’s History Network, recognising those doing rigorous research without being…
Simone Varriale, “Coloniality and Meritocracy in Unequal EU Migrations: Intersecting Inequalities in Post-2008 Italian Migration” (Bristol UP, 2023)
How do migrants make sense of migration? In Coloniality and Meritocracy in unequal EU migrations: Intersecting Inequalities in Post-2008 Italian Migration (Bristol UP, 2023), Simone Varriale, Lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough University, explores…
Utsa Mukherjee, “Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure: Children’s Leisurescapes and Parenting Cultures in Middle-Class British Indian Families” (Policy Press, 2022)
Children’s leisure lives are changing, with increasing dominance of organised activities and screen-based leisure. These shifts have reconfigured parenting practices, too. However, our current understandings of these processes…