The Discovery of Sidney Mintz: Anthropology’s Unfinished Revolution
This is the text of a paper delivered at the 2016 meetings of the American Anthropological Association. The panel was titled “The Legacies of Sidney Mintz: Discovering Political…
Tag: ACADEMIA
Insiders, Outsiders, and Intellectual Kinship #UniversityCrisis
Marshall Sahlins once dismissed the possibility that teacher-student relationships might be a kind of kinship. ‘Persons may have various relational attributes and thus be linked to diverse others…
Antiheroism: the underdog’s survival tactic #UniversityCrisis
“Where do you put your anger?” a precarious academic asked me poignantly the other day as we talked about the bad job market. The growth of precarious labor…
Unravelling Academic Precarity #UniversityCrisis
In conversation, scholars cannot help but constantly raise the subject of their increasingly precarious working conditions and the anxieties that derive from them. From such conversations we regard…
Towards a Transnational Anthropology Union #UniversityCrisis
At the last European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA) meeting, a few of us called an open meeting for early career and precarious anthropologists to discuss precarity in…
Urban development and the resistance of archaeology #newtonloss
By some estimates, one in ten thousand people in Turkey is an unemployed archaeologist. In an alternative café while on a last-minute contract in Istanbul, I got talking…
We Need Decolonial Scientists
I write this essay with the poignant words of writer and Sociology Phd student Zoe Samudzi in mind: “Donald Trump is as quintessentially American as they come. In so…
La antropología en México en 2016: Nuevas tendencias
Eventos académicos recientes En los últimos cuatro meses he asistido a un seminario permanente, tres coloquios y a un congreso de antropología en diferentes partes de México: El…
Writing Ethnographies that Everyone Can Read
Kristen Ghodsee’s new book, From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies that Everyone Can Read, was recently published by the University of Chicago Press (in 2016). The discipline of…
The Financialisation of Academic Knowledge Production
In this column for a series on academic freedom at sage social science space I looked at the financialisation of the academic book publishing industry and asked questions about changes…
The Financialisation of Academic Knowledge Production
In this column for a series on academic freedom at sage social science space I looked at the financialisation of the academic book publishing industry and asked questions about changes…
Colleex: A Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation
Fieldwork, the cornerstone to the ethnographer’s magic, seems to be under siege in recent times. The invocation that it ‘is not what it used to be’ runs parallel…
Saving the periphery from itself: The problem with thinking the postcolonial from the metropole
In February of this year, I participated in a Middle East, South Asian and African Studies graduate student conference at a New York-based university. It was, expectedly, a…
On the responsibilities of panelists
So you can tell what’s coming here. The short version is: should panelists provide for a good show (topical, interesting, cutting edge, the presentation of new research, ideas,…
Inside-out Jokes & Scientific Pantomimesis: Questioning Interpretations of the Inhuman
In a fit of ambition, I attended or spoke at five academic conferences in the humanities and social sciences during the spring 2016 semester. Discipline specificity and conference…
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…
Virtual Rountable: Latif Tas’ response #PoliticalAgency
1. To what extent does the notion of political agency help to understand political change? First of all, I think you need to change the wording of the…
Virtual Rountable – Paul Anderson’s response #PoliticalAgency
1. To what extent does the notion of political agency help to understand political change? Michel de Certeau argued that agency comes in different shapes and sizes, according…
Virtual roundtable: Deniz Gökalp’s response #PoliticalAgency
1. To what extent does the notion of political agency help to understand political change? I do not think that political agency is no longer relevant to understanding…
Virtual Roundtable: Antonio De Lauri’s response #PoliticalAgency
1. To which extent does the notion of political agency is helpful to understand political change? To some extent, the notion of political agency has been used in…
Virtual Roundtable: Luigi Achilli’s Response #PoliticalAgency
1. To what extent does the notion of political agency help to understand political change? “Political agency?! What is political agency?” When I first spoke about “political agency”…
REDUX: Publishing for PhD students #Anthroadvice
Playing a bit part in organising a workshop on academic publishing for PhD students at the next annual conference of the British Association for South Asian Studies, I…
Where are the ladies, Didier Fassin? #EASA2016 Keynote
It’s hot and humid, and yet circa 1000 anthropologists are determined to enter the main conference room of U6 of the University of Milan & Bicacca. Fortunately the…
Ivory Tower #Slow
From the poetic notes written this morning for today’s opening lecture – I communicated this but not as ‘poetically’: A PhD today is an anachronism. It is hard…