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.…
Tag: politics
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…
Anomie and aftermath: the historical residue of Flemish nationalism in present-day debates on refugees in Belgium by Hunter Keys
I. ‘Everything is the same level as the ground’ As protests against Assad morphed into slaughter, Khalid[i] did his best to avoid fighting. At the time, he was…
Medical Student Activism: Political x Institutional x Personal by Robert Rock
Robert Rock and Nientara Anderson are medical students involved in a broad range of activism efforts at the Yale School of Medicine, including the US Health Justice initiatives…
No One Right Way to Peace
When the United Nations drafted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, it established a vision of peak humanity, articulating what the assembly considered appropriate rules for…
How Have Attitudes Toward Extremism Changed Over Time?
Words are more than their dictionary definitions. Amir Ridhwan/Shutterstock This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. The …
Dump by Anne Berg
South Africa, 1994. Apartheid before, democracy after. Nonetheless, obstinate continuities stretch across this important rupture. Bisasar Road Landfill, the largest registered landfill on the A…