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…
Tag: Features
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…
“Nothing About Us Without Us!” Really?: The Unequal Value of Lives in Harm Reduction NGOs by Catherine Larocque
Canada, like most capitalist societies of the global North, faces “an unprecedented and devastating wave of overdoses” and overdose deaths (Wells, 2017), intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic (Governm…
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…
Captive to smell by Cristina A. Pop
The rise of Çatalhöyük is one of my favorite topics to cover in the Introduction to Anthropology course. Located in central Turkey, the proto-urban settlement was occupied for…
Writing Life No. 18: An Interview with Stefania Pandolfo by Basit Kareem Iqbal
The anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo approaches ethnography as not just the depiction of a world but as what addresses and displaces both the writer and the reader, where ethnography…
Criminalisation, harm reduction and responsibility in Polish drug policies by Justyna Struzik
In 2019, Sebastian Kaleta, a member of the Polish parliament associated with the ruling Law and Justice party, published a report denigrating Warsaw-based organisations working in the fields…
Chronic Time, Afflicted Lives by Aditya Bharadwaj
“Mine is an illness of time.” […] “Time has no cure.” — Catarina (Joao Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, 2005: 107) Chronic is a…
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…
Memorializing Death in an Age of Mass Mortality: Keywords of Covid-19 by Richard C. Keller
How do we remember death when it constitutes our landscape? In an age of ubiquitous mortality—not only pandemic deaths, but also deaths from meteorological disasters, deaths of migrants…
Writing Life No. 17: An Interview with Stacy Leigh Pigg by Stacy Leigh Pigg
Image 1: The desk where Stacy writes when she is actually at a desk. Have you ever taken a walk inside your article? Can you conceive of a…
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…
Introduction: Reducing Harm Responsibly? by Johannes Lenhard
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2021) estimated that, worldwide, 269 million people used drugs in 2018, a 30% increase since 2009. In the same period,…
Incarceration as Harm Reduction: The realities of lethal street-based opioid overdoses in neoliberal Philadelphia by Tali Ziv
Philadelphia is the poorest of the ten largest cities in the United States and has one of the highest rates of fatal opioid-related overdoses in the state of…
Writing Life No. 16: An Interview with Warwick Anderson by James Dunk
Figure 1: Writing and thinking in anticipation of writing: notes stacked in files next to a computer (Warkwick’s desk). In the early days of freedom after a long…
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.…
Viral Waste, or Covid Down the Toilet: Post-Colonic Pandemic Biopolitics by Warwick Anderson
Within days of discovering SARS-CoV-2, laboratory scientists and epidemiologists were speculating on whether the virus might take fecal passage, and thereby spread through contamination with bodily w…
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…
Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws: Towards a Progressive Theory of Myth: Turner and Graeber on Social Creativity
David Graeber’s work is often described as ‘myth-busting’. His most recent scholarly work with David Wengrow is explicitly so – a weeding out (excuse the farming pun) of…
AMAA on Enduring Cancer: Life, Death and Diagnosis in Delhi by Dwaipayan Banerjee
On concepts and consequences: Can we take the concepts of speech and silence, and care and disregard, which you outline throughout the book, outside the context of Delhi…