The lives of precarious workers in Western China
The Precariat in Western China by Xueyang Ma examines the experiences of workers in precarious employment in Ya’an, a city in Sichuan province, Western China. Drawing on interviews…
Tag: globalisation
Collaborative Settler Colonialism: Japanese Migration to Brazil in the age of empires
Sidney Xu Lu. 2025. Collaborative Settler Colonialism: Japanese Migration to Brazil in the Age of Empires. Oakland: University of California […] The post Collaborative Settler Colonialism: Japan…
A Woman’s Job: Making Middle Lives in New India
In this excerpt from A Woman’s Job: Making Middle Lives in New India, Asiya Islam examines the lives of educated young women working in precarious jobs in Delhi’s service sector. The…
Wild Computing: a view from anthropology
Star computation scientist Stephen Wolfram has said that in order to accelerate the capacity of artificial intelligence towards a much more […] The post Wild Computing: a view from…
Trust, truth, and the blockchain
“Less Trust, More Truth” said the black nylon drawstring bag in the cardboard box. I had to have one. No other item of swag at this crypto-conference articulated…
Globalisation and climate change in the High Arctic: Fieldwork in Svalbard, the fastest-heating place on earth
Magdalene Fjord, Svalbard. Photo: Ashok Boghani, flickr Most people can hardly imagine that it is possible to enjoy life up in Northern Norway, in Tromsø for example where…
Globalisation and climate change in the High Arctic: Fieldwork in Svalbard, the fastest-heating place on earth
Magdalene Fjord, Svalbard. Photo: Ashok Boghani, flickr Most people can hardly imagine that it is possible to enjoy life up in Northern Norway, in Tromsø for example where…
Boomtown
Here’s a short extract from my new book Boomtown: Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast, which is now available from Pluto Press and your favourite bookshop. Very proud…
Overheating: The TEDx version
In October, 2017, I spoke about Overheating at the annual TEDx event in Trondheim, central Norway. The TED format is ideally short, pithy, eye-catching and jaw-dropping. In other…
Shining diamonds: of global connections and local lifeworlds
By Robert Pijpers, University of Oslo Resources are all around us, they are in the screen you are now looking at, in the Olympic medals that have recently…
A planet afflicted by a high fever
The world is ‘overheated’. Too full and too fast; uneven and unequal. It is the age of the Anthropocene, of humanity’s indelible mark upon the planet. In short, it…
Clashing scales of Brexit
Mainstream newspapers, politicians and commentators across Europe instantly expressed dejection and bitterness in the face of the Brexit outcome, and avid Brexiteers have typically been portrayed as x…
From national icon to neoliberal monument
This text began as a radio essay on BBC Radio 4 in November 2015, later developed into a web essay at Versopolis. It chronicles the shift from the mid…
The Paris massacre and the Syrian refugee crisis
Two dramatic events, one unfolding over the last several years, the other a sudden shock, currently eclipse all other issues. Syrians desperate to escape their broken country enter…
What´s wrong with the Global North and the Global South?
Originally published by the Global South Study Centre in Cologne, along with a handful of other reflections on the concept of the Global South As a young schoolboy…
Anthropologists on deported migrants, unusual bureaucrats, and the thriving solidarity economy in Greece
While I am trying to get back into the blogging business, here three selected pieces that I've written recently for the University of Oslo. Two of them are…
Anthropologists on deported migrants, unusual bureaucrats, and the thriving solidarity economy in Greece
While I am trying to get back into the blogging business, here three selected pieces that I've written recently for the University of Oslo. Two of them are…
What the life of a pair of flip-flops can teach us about migration, inequality and studying up
Photo: Cíntia Regina, flickr During the recent (nearly) two years, I’ve been interviewing researchers that are part of the research project Overheating. The three crises of globalisation: An…
What the life of a pair of flip-flops can teach us about migration, inequality and studying up
Photo: Cíntia Regina, flickr During the recent (nearly) two years, I’ve been interviewing researchers that are part of the research project Overheating. The three crises of globalisation: An…