Ethnography & Case Study Research: Saying yes to the project
Over the past few Mondays, we have been posting on the recent case-study research project I worked on with OCWI. Working with OCWI on this short-term project was…
Tag: neoliberalism
Ethnography & Case Study Research: Saying yes to the project
Over the past few Mondays, we have been posting on the recent case-study research project I worked on with OCWI. Working with OCWI on this short-term project was…
This Does Not Represent the Views of the University
I know that I am not the first person to ask this, but when did universities start having “views”? When some professors indulge their rights to free speech…
Book Review: The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology by John Smyth
In The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology, John Smyth offers a critical reading of the pathological state of higher education today, diagnosing this as th…
Quinn Slobodian: Against the neoliberalism taboo
Daniel Rodgers has written the latest would-be obituary for neoliberalism as a category of analysis, hot off the press in the first 2018 issue of Dissent magazine. Like…
The Price of Eggs: Iran’s protests beyond democracy and capitalism
As the dust settles on Iran’s recent bout of protests, the surge of commentary, punditry, and analysis is likely to continue, no longer working to explain these apparently…
Privilege: White, American, or Imperial?
To the extent that “white privilege” continues to exist in the US, is it the highest form of privilege? How might a focus on domestic race relations misdirect us from an…
Democratization vs. Liberalism in Canada
Many North Americans (leaving aside Mexico), would likely not know that the official acronym for “North Korea” is “DPRK,” and if they did then fewer still might realize…
Cultural Appropriation, Cultural Exploitation, Cultural Genocide: Problems of Neoliberal Diversity Management
“The Emergence of the Chief” is a statue on the Loyola campus of Concordia University in Montreal. {click to enlarge} In Canada, “a yoga instructor…says her free class…
How to write about #precarity from a precarious position
Let me start with a confession: Throughout the past year or so I have become somewhat hesitant to attend conferences and other academic gatherings. This sense of reluctance…
Academia in Dark Times of Austerity Politics and Authoritarianism #precarity
In these days, two at first sight independent developments are threatening academic freedom. Neoliberal austerity politics and authoritarian political tendencies both leave their traces in academia, s…
Agency, Upkeep, and Neglect in North Carolina Farm Labor Camps
by Bennett Heine In a recent article in Human Organization, co-authors Thomas Arcury, Sarah Quandt, and I draw from interviews with migrant farmworkers to conclude that agency matters.…
In Academia, All You Need is Love
Questions about Exploitation and Invisible Work in Academia It is an open secret amongst academics that universities exploit the labour of their academic staff, and more importantly, that…
“The Road Goes Ever On and On”: The PhD Candidate, Uncertainty and Creative #Blogging
To say that a PhD in anthropology represents a journey is equal parts cliché and “social fact,” at least for some students. In this short blog post, I…
Chris Hann: Hayek versus Polanyi in Montréal: Global society as markets, all the way across?
The workshop “Geographies of Markets”—hosted over three days in mid-June 2017 by the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University, Montréal—gave scholars from a wide range…
Class Politics and Romania’s “White Revolution”
The color white embodied exclusionary middle-class aspirations to moral governance and virtuous citizenship. Romania’s “White Revolution” (January–February 2017), the most recent episode of East Eur…
Videos: The Adventures of the Master Class Reconsidered
Here we return to the theme of the previous feature on “reality tourism,” and the promotional materials produced by the Razor’s Edge company. With this, we complete our…
How to Make Extremism Mainstream and Fake a Debate about Islamophobia
Is there a genuine debate taking place about Islamophobia? When and why did the “concern” about Islamophobia reach the highest levels of government in North America and western…
Review: Academic Conferences as Neoliberal Commodities
by Fawzia Haeri Mazanderani ** Review first published on LSE Review of Books ** Academic Conferences as Neoliberal Commodities. Donald J. Nicolson. Palgrave Pivot. 2017. While rarely interrogated…
Anthropology under my skin
What follows is the text of the presentation I gave as part of the the Reclaiming Anthropology panel during the Anthropology in Aotearoa Symposium held at Victoria University…
Donald Trump, Empire, and Globalization: A Reassessment
“Hey, I’m a nationalist and a globalist,” Donald Trump recently declared, “I’m both”. The only way in which the two (seemingly contradictory) positions can be reconciled is by…
Precarity as Freedom? Youth, Neoliberalism and the Dissolution of ‘Japan, Inc.’
by Shuto Fukuoka It would not be an overstatement to say that the Japanese youth of today are significantly foreign to the one a couple of decades ago,…
Review of Newfield’s The Great Mistake
I just sent in a review of Chris Newfield’s The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them to LATISS. The book’s out already; the review should be…
Enterprising Opportunities: Responsibilising Ghana’s Poor
by Tim Perkin Agbogbloshie is an area of Accra, Ghana’s capital, which has become a graveyard for global electronic waste (e-waste). In light of its structural adjustment after…