When will the United States collapse?
As of 4 April 2018, I had been working on a draft of this post on “when will the United States collapse” for a month or so. I…
Tag: politics
Patrick Neveling and Tijo Salverda: How capitalists think—about belonging, moralities, global entanglements, and historical social processes, for example
Given that nowadays most people live in societies organized according to capitalist principles and given that few oppose those principles fundamentally, capitalists may well constitute the world’s lar…
Fragile Security or Fatale Liaisons? Reflections on 2 March 2018 Attacks in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, by Sten Hagberg
On Friday 2 March 2018 around 10 o’clock, two coordinated of terrorist attacks took place in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. The first attack involved gunmen seeking…
Jostling for power: Sierra Leone’s election runoff, by Luisa Enria and Jamie Hitchen
After six days of patiently waiting, during which 25% increments of Sierra Leone’s 7 March presidential vote were gradually released, on the evening of 13 March, chair of…
Reaching Out, Looking In: On Research, Refusal, and Responsibility by Tess Lanzarotta
The papers in this series, “Critical Histories, Activist Futures,” have captured some of the exciting conversations that took place during a conference titled “Critical Histories, Activist Futures: Sc…
Guns & Anthropology
For the March issue of Open Anthropology we will be highlighting anthropological responses and ethnographic resources on the topics of guns, gun violence, gun safety, and gun control.…
Institutional Inconsistencies: The Case of “Transgender” by V Varun Chaudhry
The CDC’s recent attempt to dictate and regulate possibilities for funding and research included attention to broad swaths of people, including those deemed “vulnerable” and/or receiving “entitlements…
Racism by any Other Name Is Still Racism
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed and issued Executive Order 9066 in the name of national security.…
The De-socializing of Jim Kim? by Jon Shaffer
The 12th president of the World Bank Group, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, is arguably the most powerful anthropologist in the world. As the co-founder of the groundbreaking NGO…
Ep. #7 The knowledge we value: Dipesh Chakrabarty talks the contentious politics of knowledge production
“Doing history ideally is like doing anthropology of people who are gone, except that you don’t have native informants, you only have these written fragmentary sources. But the…
The legacy of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf: Why ‘great aspiration’ is not quite enough, by Leena Vastapuu and Maria Martin de Almagro
The first elected woman head of state in Africa, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, has just stepped down from her office in Liberia. Her successor George Weah assumed the position…
Living and F*cking with Acronyms: A response to Dennis Altman’s call to rethink LGBTI
Last week Australian academic Dennis Altman published a provocative piece in The Conversation, suggesting that it was time to re think the label LGBTI. In the place of…
Defining “Social Justice” at the Academic Medical Center by Marco A. Ramos
I am delighted to contribute to this series on the Critical Histories and Activist Futures: Science, Medicine, and Racial Violence Conference. As captured by the submissions published here…
REDUX: “Cleaning Up the Streets” #AnthroState
Hillbrow, Johannesburg: It’s April 2008. I am in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, one of Johannesburg’s most happening nightclubs since the Apartheid era. As with the Hillbrow…
The state of the state in #Africa
How political authority and legitimacy are sustained in societies marked by socio-economic inequality and political exclusion has been a long-standing preoccupation in the social sciences. Especially …
Soft Power: The Over-Determined Politicization of Vulnerable in the #CDC7words by Elizabeth Bromley
At first blush, the inclusion of the word vulnerable alongside words like fetus, evidence-based, and diversity in the list of 7 words discouraged for use in budget documents…
Dust by Nick Caverly
The building pictured below sat near Mack Avenue on Detroit’s far east side and, according to the municipal government, was an environmental hazard. Following years of complaints from…
Public health politicised: A response to the politics of CDC language and implications for global health, wellbeing and inequalities by Ben Kasstan
In this response we address how the recent language controversy surrounding the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) must be considered as part of a broader politicisation…
Beyond “Banned Words”: The CDC, Trump’s Anti-Science, and Anthropological Outrage by Charles L. Briggs
I am delighted that anthropologists joined the debate unleashed by a story published in the Washington Post on 15 December 2017, in which health reporter Lena Sun and…
The Politics of Explaining Taiwan
Mail to Taiwan often gets sent to Thailand Imagine if, when writing a paper on Donald Trump, you had to start your paper by saying the following:1 The…
Ep. #4 “Killer Docs, Imaginary Landscapes, Political Lies, and Emotional Risk:” this month on TFS
In this month’s panel discussion, Jodie (1:14) tells us about documents with agency: “Ideas just get up and grow legs, and they run away with themselves.” (Trigger warning:…
Justice, Science, and Pedagogy by Myrna Perez Sheldon
As we consider the role of justice in pedagogy and scholarship, I want to ask a simple but difficult question: What is our ethical task? Do we desire…
Unpicking an (A)moral Anthropological Stance: Ongoing violence in Myanmar
Author: Justine Chambers, Doctoral candidate with the Department of Anthropology, School of Culture, History and Languages (CHL) at the Australian National University. You can read more about her…
Turkey.
Gah. Still. No. Change. >Subject: Call for solidarity for the academics for peace on trial Dear colleagues, Our colleagues in Turkey are facing incredible repression under a populist…