“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Ethnographic film is blooming Ethnographic film, however loosely defined, is blooming. While to track and map the entire production of ethnographic film appears next-to impossible, I want to…
When is a coup a coup? Reflections on the anthropological study of ‘coups’ There have been more than 200 coups in 95 countries over the last 75 years,…
On June 8, 2021, Amazon deployed an “opt-in” way for people to enable the company to expand its private network into communities, creating infrastructure to peddle even more…
The partial biographies presented in this piece are situated as stoppages that mark generational experiences of structural change in South Korea. In Part I, I considered how biographies…
“Everything is research data.” As PhD students we must have heard this statement from teachers, mentors, and supervisors a hundred times. The advice points to the widely held…
In this piece, I document partial biographies of two residents of Seoul that were narrated across the course of fieldwork between 2019 and 2020. These fieldnotes consider what…
I never expected that laughter would be part of the solution. I had set out on fieldwork with rather vague notions about the importance of sensitivity and silence…
One particularly warm morning in September 2020, I am looking at photographs and videos in the media depicting the aftermath of medicane (Mediterranean hurricane) Ianós that just rampaged…
Disclaimer: Over the last few days, I have had a writing episode. Nothing had come out of my brain for months. I was teaching online and worrying about…
Imagine Gustav Klimt’s tender motifs, with their gleaming, golden elements, projected onto huge concrete walls. This fascinating vision has become an immersive exhibition at the new ‘Les Bassin…
During the Syrian war, which has now raged for a decade, the attention of scholars, media commentators and activists has primarily focused on human displacement. More than 60%…
Part Four: “When will this Covid be over?” During the first month of T.’s search for work in Dubai, Covid-19 felt like something that had happened last spring.…
Part Three: A Travel Agent selling Freedom For the second half of my stay, I lived in a shared accommodation of mostly Egyptian men in Ajman, which is…
Part Two: New Opportunities, New Stress In the Gulf region, Dubai has been a forerunner in the transformation towards a neoliberal market of skills and hands. Gulf countries…
Since its publication in 2019, Darryl Li’s The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press) has been the focus of a great deal…
An act of walking into the wilderness implies an act of walking out of somewhere or something. The Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which extends over the US states…
‘I’ve been here before’ – the feeling of the present being firmly rooted in the past can be intense and disorienting. It is difficult to trace, like a…