While explaining the origins of Gramsci’s definition of hegemony to an interviewer, the labour historian Michael Denning (2023) suggested taking a Jeopardy! approach to social theory, which is…
The silence around the salience of race in development and humanitarianism (see White 2002, Kothari 2006) has lately been interrupted by an increased attention to white saviourism, especially…
Critical scholars recognize humanitarianism as a racializing project rooted in colonial and imperial relations, in which classifications of aid workers as ‘international’, ‘expat’, ‘national’ and ‘loc…
The German governing coalition explicitly considers refugee integration to be a humanitarian project based on an obligation to care for others because of their shared humanity. Notably, however,…
The call for looking at taxonomies of difference in global humanitarianism is a powerful reminder to consider how differences—as well as, we argue, affinities—shape humanitarian practices. Prompted by…
Humanitarian action is marked by a striking disjunction between the universalising humanist vocabulary that undergirds its ethical commitments, and the taxonomies of racialised difference that govern …
It was 2009 when, while living in a squatted house in the Montreuil, a leftist banlieue on the East side of Paris, I was asked how it was…
I do not want to focus too much on the definitions of social phenomena because I find it more interesting to look at the structures (synchronic and diachronic)…
On November 14, 2023, at the University of Toronto, we, the conveners of the Political Economy Discussion Group, an informal transnational group of anthropologists working in political economy,…
This book forum brings together seven scholars and artists to discuss Todd Meyers’s All That Was Not Her (Duke 2022). A profoundly introspective and original book, All That Was…
Masks have long been a symbol of resistance movements around the world, especially in East Asia. As early as the 1960s, protestors in Japan began wearing masks during…
Trauma is a concept with wide-ranging impact, moving out of limited psychiatric fields into the popular imagination and policy (Fassin 2009). Psychologists now accompany medical doctors in the w…
Image 1: One of Ruth’s writing spaces filled with family and childhood photos, art and objects that inspire her and that are filled with memories. On the laptop…
Multimorbidity, or the co-occurrence of two or more long-term health conditions in one person, is seen as one of the greatest challenges to contemporary healthcare services. As the…
Figure 1: Emma Kowal writing her thesis in 2006 with 7-month old Maya in Darwin, Australia. Image: supplied. One evening in December 2021, in a small South African…
On May 25, 2022, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed into law the strictest ban on abortion to date, a policy that prohibits the termination of any pregnancy “from…
We were saddened to hear of the passing of our dear colleague Adele H. Hite in April 2022. Adele was a co-founding member of the Nutrire CoLab and…
Addiction is exceedingly moralized. Perhaps no other concept associated with the experience of addiction reveals this more than that of responsibility. Too often, addiction is understood in…
The debate around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the previous contributions in FocaalBlog, has shifted from the ‘either NATO or Russia’ dichotomy to a more nuanced exchange…
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,…
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…
Behind the long counter of Café Dugnad, smells of spices and meat float out of industrial ovens. Light streams in through the glass doors of the smallish café,…
Here’s the first part of the In the Journals for March. There’s a special issue of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry called “Special Issue on Being Human in the…
In 1992 Nancy Munn argued anthropological research should pay more attention to people’s lived realities of time. Since then, we have seen time and temporalities grow into a…