Speaking Justice to Power, 2025
Academic Freedom, Immigration, and Carceral Regimes At the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings, New Orleans Cosponsored by APLA (Association for … More
Tag: justice
What it means to live in a city of equals
City of Equals by Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit examines what it means for one citizen of a city to feel equal to another, despite different experiences and…
Coyote Chaos in the Anthropocene
A couple of weeks ago, a coyote climbed the fence into my mother’s backyard and attacked one of her dogs, Cujo. The coyote only stopped its assault when…
Reconciliation by Stealth: How People Talk about War Crimes – review
In Reconciliation by Stealth: How People Talk about War Crimes, Denisa Kostovicova considers how best to achieve reconciliation in post-conflict societies, focusing on case studies from the Balkan…
Urban Arena – a podcast about sustainable and just cities
Urban Arena – a podcast about sustainable and just cities Cities can play a crucial role in creating just and sustainable futures. Urban Arena is a series of…
Kenyan Mothers Take on Police Violence
Lucy Wambui is a convenor of the Mothers of Victims and Survivors Network in Nairobi. Ed Ram I first met Sarah Wangari three weeks after her son Alex…
In the Journals – Police Abolition
Allegory of Justice (Sanctity of the Law) by The Metropolitan Museum of Art via PICRYL Welcome back to In the Journals! This ongoing series aims to bridge conversations…
Violence against land defenders
There is important new work on the violence against land defenders worth reading over the summer. Here is a recent article in Global Environmental Change and a write…
Unearthing the True Toll of the Tulsa Race Massacre
The Booker T. Washington High School parade processes along Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood Cultural Center Just north of downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, Greenwood once had one o…
COVID-19 and the Failure of Neoliberalism in the Face of Crisis
We are firmly set in the middle of a global pandemic at the moment. As it currently stands, the World Health Organization (WHO) is reporting just under 300,000…
White Men and Their Toxic White Fragility
It has been several months since the shooting in my classroom at UNC Charlotte where two of my students were killed, four were physically injured, and an untold…
The Limitations of Compassion in International Volunteering
On April 15, 2013, at 2:49 p.m., two bombs were detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The effects were physically devastating — three dead and…
Religion and politics in the US: How the Christian Right moves away from Jesus
Along with an anthropology degree, I also completed a degree in philosophy with a focus on philosophy of religion. My primary interests in that are theodicies (excuses for…
The Story of a Mass Shooting Survivor and Anthropologist
On April 30, my Liberal Studies class, framed as Anthropology and Philosophy of Science (Syllabus), was the site of a horrific event. Two of my students were…
Admissions Fraud and the SAT: Hidden Implications
As you are well aware, there is a huge college admissions scandal that has been brought to life. Forbes calls it “The Worst Crime In College Admissions History…
Book Review: “How to Think Like an Anthropologist”
After each semester I evaluate what did and didn’t work in my classes. I didn’t teach Introduction to Anthropology for Fall 2018 so I had an extra semester…
Revisiting Geno-colonization: Senator Warren and “Native DNA”
I woke up this morning to the news that Senator Elizabeth Warren has released a DNA test “providing strong evidence” that she has a Native American ancestor 6-10…
Biology, Race, and “Orientalism”
Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978 and is highly influential, both in post-colonial studies and social theory. Said argues that through the construction of the ‘Orient’ (the East) a…
Populations, Race, and The Sorites Paradox
The sorites paradox (also called the paradox of the heap) refers to a particular logical contradiction that arises from the analysis of vague terms (Sainsbury, 2009). Terms like…
Science as a Structure of Violence
The study of human diversity and subsequent racialisation of people has been examined and critiqued but has escaped interrogation as an institution by which structural violence is enacted.…
A Brief History of Race in the Western Thought
Race, as a concept, has important ontology in American society. In order to understand the relationship between race, genetic research, and the American class structure, it is necessary…
The Personhood and Rights of Apes
I spent the earliest part of my career as an anthropologist studying captive chimpanzees at the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, NC. While there, I always made a…