Hemangini Gupta‘s Experimental Times explores the gendered dynamics of startup capitalism in Bangalore, offering a rich ethnographic study of labour, urban space, and entrepreneurship. Tanushree…
They Only Want Us from the Neck Down Across the airport car park, a figure in a mad dash—a sprawl […] The post Being Fungible – They Only…
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…
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…
In January 2020, the Senegalese President Macky Sall announced a nation-wide ‘Cleaning Day’. Together with a ‘Zero waste’ campaign and followed by monthly ‘Cleaning Days’, he invited citizens to…
by Holly Cawsey In June 2012, Rio de Janeiro saw the close of Jardim Gramacho, one of the largest landfills in the world. At its height, Jardim Gramacho…
Allegra Editor Ian sits down with Thread guest editors Viola Castellano & Olivia Casagrande to discuss ‘Encountering precarities: ethnography, spurious solidarity and neoliberal academia.…
This post is part of our Encountering Precarities series. The thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and t…
This post is part of our Encountering Precarities series. The thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and t…
This post is part of our Encountering Precarities series. The thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and t…
In the wake of calls for responsibility and for ‘Raising our voice’ (AAA 2020), early-career researchers’ in anthropology risk to bear the weight to redeem the discipline while…
There is a global push towards making AI more ethical and transparent. As critical contributions on the topic of AI have pointed out: even when computational applications are…
Last spring, I began work with the open access advocacy group, Libraria, as a Community Convener to help organize a mutual aid network amongst a group of open…
The Familiar Strange · Ep #101: When Anthropology Strikes Back: Strikes & Casualisation in Academia This week we’re back for a really important panel. This week, Familiar Strangers…
I invite you to share in a partial and subjective review of the exhausting academic marathon that was the 17th congress of the European Association of Social Anthropologists…
After a long drive, Sheila and I arrive at the gates of a sprawling fifty-one square mile Malawian sugar plantation that belongs to Africa’s largest sugar company. An…
Image by Nick Youngson, courtesy of Picpedia.org. A couple of months ago, I was trawling Twitter looking for inspiration when I came across a notice that Libraria –…
In this webinar series, we explore the relationship between mobility and humanitarianism in the course of four episodes. We – this is Till Mostowlansky, an anthropologist at The…
I met Engineer Yakiv[1] on board a merchant ship I had joined just south of Sri Lanka in early 2013. I was there to study seafarers’ perceptions of…
Matan Kaminer’s reflections on the workshop, “Rethinking surplus populations” is full of interesting insights and challenging puzzles. As he says, “operationalizing this concept [surplus populations]…
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…
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…
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…
by Connie Scott “Fish simply appear in supermarkets” (p.209), writes Penny McCall Howard. Most consumers have little or no awareness of where their fish comes from, or of…