Walden Bello: The Mess in Argentina
At the heart of Buenos Aires lies the lovely Calle Florida. The experience of walking through this street that is exclusively dedicated to pedestrians was anything but lovely…
Tag: neoliberalism
A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe – review
In A Vital Frontier, Andrea Muehlebach considers how the neoliberal financialisation of water as a public utility has sparked citizen-led resistance across Europe. Sharing ethnographic insights into a…
Significant Emotions: Rhetoric and Social Problems in a Vulnerable Age – review
In Significant Emotions, Ashley Frawley critiques the trend of pathologising distress caused by socio-economic problems (like cost-of-living pressures and insecure, low-paid employment) as “ment…
A Nation of Shopkeepers – review
Dan Evans’s A Nation of Shopkeepers explores the growth of the “petty bourgeoisie” in the UK following Thatcherism, as the rise of home ownership, small landlordism and changes to the…
Julia Soul: Between Confrontation and Silent Discipline: Working-Class Dilemmas under Javier Milei’s Far-Right Government in Argentina
With the triumph of Javier Milei in Argentina’s November 2023 national election, the country has followed the contemporary global trend of electing far-right governments. Through his frequent televisi…
The coopting of ‘participation’ in development discourse: observations from the ground
When concepts such as ‘participation’ that emanated from radical movements with the objective of transforming social relations and power structures are introduced and popularised in the public discour…
Review: Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh, by Lamia Karim, University of Minnesota Press, (2022)
by Shormila Akter Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh examines the lives of female garments workers, shaped by “a state that colluded with…
Anthropology’s Seen and Unseen
In 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace sent a breathless letter to his friend and colleague, Thomas Huxley, inviting Huxley to join him in exploring a “new branch of anthropology”:…
Duties of Care, Servicing Debt
What better place could there be to think about the interconnections between service, duty and care than the Venetian Palazzo Vendramin dei Carmini? The palazzo is a 17th…
The Household’s Basket: Households in a Basket, Part 2
Leonidas VournelisBaruch College, CUNY In part one of this essay, I briefly described the workings of the “Household’s Basket”, a policy by the Greek government designed to help…
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…
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…
The Household’s Basket: Households in a basket
Leonidas VournelisBaruch College, CUNY Editor’s note: This is part 1 of a 2 part essay. Like most EU countries during the past year Greece has been faced with…
Ewald Engelen: Another ‘populist’ shake-up in the Netherlands: the BBB revolt
The shock among the Dutch chattering classes on 16 March was palpable. The right-populist Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) – established in 2019 by a small communications firm, bankrolled by…
Giorgos Poulimenakos & Dimitris Dalakoglou: Disaster Infrastructures and the Inverted Shock Doctrine in Greece
On March 1st 2023, an impromptu protest rally took place outside the headquarters of Greece’s only railway company, Hellenic Trains (HT). HT is the passenger carrier of the…
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…
Neoliberalism and small-hall boxing: two zero sum games?
By Louis Gregory – Few people know much about the surreal world of English small-hall boxing, a world away from its professional, globalised alternative. Small-hall boxing is a…
Profit over people? The ‘big business’ of tough immigration laws.
By Renata Carvalho As the new Nationality and Borders Bill sparks yet another wave of debates over the United Kingdom’s immigration tactics, it is important to ask: who…
Criminalisation, harm reduction and responsibility in Polish drug policies by Justyna Struzik
In 2019, Sebastian Kaleta, a member of the Polish parliament associated with the ruling Law and Justice party, published a report denigrating Warsaw-based organisations working in the fields…
Book Review: Preventing Dementia? Critical Perspectives on a New Paradigm of Preparing for Old Age by Barbara Pieta
Preventing Dementia? Critical Perspectives on a New Paradigm of Preparing for Old Age Edited by Annette Leibing and Silke Schicktanz Berghahn Books, 2020. 268 pages In their recently…
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (Book Review)
by Ellie Plumb In Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Seth M. Holmes seeks to uncover the synergistic effects that citizenship, race, ethnicity, and…
David Harvey: Remarks on Recent Events in the Ukraine: An Interim Statement
Image 1: Young girl protesting the war in Ukraine, photo by Matti. David Harvey prepared this text for the 2022 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. We publish…
Incarceration as Harm Reduction: The realities of lethal street-based opioid overdoses in neoliberal Philadelphia by Tali Ziv
Philadelphia is the poorest of the ten largest cities in the United States and has one of the highest rates of fatal opioid-related overdoses in the state of…
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…