Waiting as Productive Fieldwork
Several weeks into my fieldwork at one of the Integrated Tribal Development Agencies (ITDA) in Telangana, a federal state in India, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I…
Tag: One-Shots
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Anti-Boycott Laws?
Anthropologists are often quick to decry the law as a fig leaf for the exercise of raw political or economic power. Yet when holding bureaucratic sinecures, anthropologists’ daily…
SUBTRACTIONS AND ACCUMULATIONS
The following curated collection of fragments outlines two main strategies used over the last ten years in the creation of contemporary artworks to memorialise events: subtraction and accumulation.…
Give a Hand To the Fallen, as Long as You Are Standing: Earthquake Disaster Relief among Afghans
Mullah Yaqub appeared in the doorway of his Quranic school, and smiled when he saw me, shaking my hand firmly. He looked tall in his long dark-blue felted…
Going beneath the surface: The subtler messages about forced displacement in ‘The Swimmers’
The screen is dark, the music sombre. There are sounds of muffled voices and explosions. The dark screen breaks to reveal blue skies as the words “2011: A…
Sticky Relationships at Wartime
Chimit, a Buryat professional in his late 20s, had been considering moving to Europe for at least a decade, but this plan proved hardly feasible with his low…
Against false solidarity. A call for true solidarity among people with experiences of displacement.
Ideas discussed in this contribution were first presented at the Solidarity, Displacement & the University workshop that took place on October 13-14, 2022, in Berlin and focused on…
A Claxonomy of Mexico City’s Traffic
Anyone who spends time in Mexico City will spend much of it in traffic. One of the most clogged cities in the world, residents will lose on average…
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…
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…
“ARE YOU HEADING TO THE FUN ZONE?”: NOTES FROM THE POLISH-UKRAINIAN BORDER
Research takes you to unexpected places. After finishing my PhD, I got a postdoc position at the ERC-funded project WARFUN led by Antonio De Lauri at the Christian…
Sliding through life
On a chilly afternoon in April of 2016, Lana and I were about to embark on a ride through Saint Petersburg’s bustling downtown, so she was instructing me…
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 –…
“You hurt our monuments, you hurt our heroes, you go to jail for ten years”: Contested histories at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021
Minutes before Trump told his supporters to march on the US Capitol and to “fight like hell,” he reminded them of a “little law” against attacking national monuments:…
Sister Parks: North American Coloniality and the Monarch Butterfly
Monarch migration and the making of North America At the end of each summer, the northern prairies and Great Lakes regions of North America host a new generation…
When Nothing Fits
Disclaimer: All people mentioned were able to choose how they want to appear in this text. They chose to appear by their clear name and/or activist alias. They…
please use your discretion to adjust your hope
any day or part day that the individual sees their child in person in the UK counts as a day on which they see their child in 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…
Multispecies Anarchism in the Postnuclear World
Connect the dots between “state”, “imperialism”, and “war”. Add “leaders”, “testosterone” and “nukes”. Look at the picture and tell me anarchism was a bad idea. In effect, as…
Who gets to be ‘Myanmar’ at the ICJ?
The Myanmar military will appear at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague on 21 February 2022. Their main interest does not lie in defending the…
How Do Personal Data and Algorithms Influence Our Sense of Self?
All achievement is threatened by the machine, as long as it dares to take its place in the mind, instead of obeying. That the master’s hand no…
Street Affects in Kashmir
This piece offers an ‘inside-out’ perspective on everyday life in a militarized space. As a researcher and a Kashmiri, the writer is struggling to document the ordinary-everyday lives…