Encountering Precarities: The Podcast
Allegra Editor Ian sits down with Thread guest editors Viola Castellano & Olivia Casagrande to discuss ‘Encountering precarities: ethnography, spurious solidarity and neoliberal academia.…
Tag: labour
Unfinished adulthood: discontinuous precarities as epistemic opportunities
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…
A striking comparison: on young Senegalese wrestlers and precarious scholars
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…
Unsteady grounds: On ethnography, academic precarity, and motherhood
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…
Encountering precarities: ethnography, spurious solidarity and neoliberal academia
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…
How to use health technologies to “kill one little deer in the dark forest”
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…
Yes, Scholar-Publishers Can Make Common Cause After All
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…
Ep #101: When Anthropology Strikes Back: Strikes & Casualisation in Academia
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…
An anthropological chronicle from EASA 2022
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…
Global health meets sugar capitalism
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…
Can scholar-led publishers find common cause?
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 –…
Mobile Humanitarians: Mobilities after Displacement
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…
“We don’t have to whisper”: Fieldnotes from Odesa
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…
Gavin Smith: Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour
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]…
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…
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…
Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea (Book Review)
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…
Matan Kaminer: Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop
I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part…
The only lesson is that there aren’t enough jobs
Every so often something happens that perfectly encapsulates the consumptive death rattle that is the job market in higher education. A few weeks ago, the department of anthropology…
#failures: Living Out of Synch
In their introduction to this thematic series, and the symposium that preceded it, Berisha, Mafizzoli and Ojani invite us to reflect on what happens when breakdown becomes the…
#Reviews: Fires of Gold
As of 2019, Ghana is the country with the largest gold-mining industry in Africa, overtaking South Africa, after two South African gold mining companies shifted focus on the…
Runways to the Sky #Roadsides
Road building in the Maldives – an archipelago of small coralline islands – sounds a bit like a euphemism for a ridiculous task. Maldivian roads present uniquely closed…
When the Silk Road Vanished #Roadsides
“I still need to cross Attabad before I reach home” – so our Shimshali travel companion commented matter-of-factly. We had just spent ten days walking along the Pakistan–Afghanistan…