The Colonial Roots of Peru’s Troubles
An archaeologist traces the current protests in Peru to exploitive labor policies enacted in silver mines during Spanish colonial rule from 1532 to 1800. ✽ Last month, Peru’s…
Tag: Labor
When Disaster Tests the Strength of Human Cooperation
In the Andes, minga, a form of collective labor, has existed for centuries, often helping communities weather disasters. But how does it work in practice? ✽ Judith grew…
Fishing in the Shadow of Oil
In the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, fishing communities have become part of a complex “assemblage” of human and natural worlds shaped by the global fossil fuel…
With So Few Farmers, Why Are Video Games About Farming So Popular?
An archaeologist considers what farming simulators reveal about humanity’s ancient and evolving relationship with agriculture. ✽ “I hate when I have to harvest at night,” my husband complained…
Chihab El Khachab on his book, Making Film in Egypt
Interview by Meg Morley https://aucpress.com/product/making-film-in-egypt/https://aucpress.com/product/making-film-in-egypt/ Meg Morley: How do/would you explain the central arguments of yo…
Ergin Bulut on his book, A Precarious Game
Interview by Xiao Xe https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501746536/a-precarious-game/ Xiao Ke: It was a great pleasure to read about such a fun topic, executed in a rigorous way, …
Copyright on the Farm
By MC Forelle This article is based off of the work recently published by the author in New Media and Society, titled “Copyright and the modern car: Colliding…
Like, Share, Comment, and Follow: Labor and Capital on Instagram
Screenshot of the Instagram profile of the influencer discussed in the blog. Social media content creator Ishita Mangal (@ishitamangal) uploaded a post with multiple slides on her Instagram…
Days of Their Lives: The Limits, Possibilities, and Parallels of Media-Ted Research during a Pandemic
On a regular day, a Hindi soap opera production set in Mumbai is home to upwards of 100 artists and technicians – production associates, actors, make-up artists, costume…
A moral politics of blame
Modern municipal waste disposal is not limited to removal of garbage, but often involves a strategic churning out of unwanted people, and extreme events such as dump fires…
Cargo Ships and Comrades: On the Occasion of the Beached Ever Given
In 2018, we took a cargo ship from Barcelona to New York City and made a short film called Slop Chest [1] about the blurry distinction between work…
Waste and Recycling in Cold War Eastern Europe
This short study analyzes the professional and political discussions of post-industrial and post-consumer waste, discards and recycling in state-socialist Hungary and connects these discourses with th…
The ‘chronic’ lives of failing organs: afflictions of ambivalent care in Mexico by Ciara Kierans
Life has always been difficult, Maria del Rosario told me, but she coped. That was before all the sickness. When her mother’s kidneys began to fail, she felt…
Chronic Experimentation by Kane Race
The introduction of effective combination antiretroviral therapy for HIV disease in 1996 was commonly narrated as a major event that transformed HIV from an inevitable death sentence into…
Chronic caring in unstable landscapes by Josien de Klerk
The current ‘end of AIDS era,’ referred to as Treat All in policy circles,is characterized by the primary aim of identifying and putting all HIV-positive people on antiretroviral treatment …
Becoming without: Rearing and Releasing Transgenic Mosquitoes in Brazil
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2020 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the…
Disability Justice and Material Needs: Reflections on the Experiences of Autistic New Yorkers Living Under Covid-19 by Cara Ryan
As a member of NYU’s Disability Equity in the Time of COVID-19 research team during the summer of 2020[1], I had the opportunity to conduct seven virtual interviews by…
African Immigrant Care Workers & COVID in the US: Their Fears, Protections, and Recalibrations by Cati Coe
The US healthcare system depends on the labor of immigrant healthcare professionals, a fact mainly unrecognized and unreported during the pandemic. Twenty-eight percent of physicians are foreign-born…
Jobseekers in Dubai in the time of COVID-19 (II)
Part Two: New Opportunities, New Stress In the Gulf region, Dubai has been a forerunner in the transformation towards a neoliberal market of skills and hands. Gulf countries…
Indian Food Delivery Networks During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Over the past decade, the concept of the gig economy has gained momentum in academic discourse. Often linked to temporary employment created by multinational technological corporations through digital…
The Toil of Waste: Wasting and Redemption in the Global E-Waste Economy
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2020 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline…
Sanderien Verstappen: Hidden behind toilet rolls: visual landscapes of COVID-19
During the lockdowns of spring 2020, short videos became a popular means of reflecting on new experiences of quarantine and social distancing. Passed around on social media platforms,…
Killing the Workers Who Feed Us
Keeping processing lines running at workers’ expense is not only a sign of our pandemic times. The meat and poultry processing industry has long treated workers as disposable.…
COVID-19 measures and industrial workplaces
The obsession that media has had with small businesses has hidden the most aggressive public health measures are missing the biggest driver of the pandemic: large industrial workplaces.