What We Talk About When We Talk About Academic Freedom: A View from the United States
The purpose of this essay is to open a conversation with scholars from around the world on the topic of […] The post What We Talk About When…
The purpose of this essay is to open a conversation with scholars from around the world on the topic of […] The post What We Talk About When…
During Tania’s summer 2025 internship at the Open Door Clinic in Addison County, Vermont, she translated for a migrant farmworker, […] The post Mobility as Dependence: Politics of…
Mohammed El-Kurd. 2025. Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal. Chicago: Haymarket Books. “To refuse that which has been refused […] The post Perfect Victims and the Politics…
This essay examines the social life of silence in the Lake Chad Basin after years of insurgent violence. The post “There is Nothing to See”: Silence and the…
Introduction This essay is an inquiry into projects, the model of agency that projects presuppose, and the limits of that […] The post Projects and Anti-Projects appeared first…
Vera Egbers, Christa Kamleithner, Özge Sezer and Alexandra Skedzuhn-Safir. 2024. Architectures of Colonialism: Constructed Histories, Conflicting Memories. Berlin: De Gruyter […] The post Archit…
Introduction: Morality and power in humanitarian honors The arrival of hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Europe nearly a […] The post In the grey zone of…
An archaeologist unspools the story of a female leader buried over 1,000 years ago on the Tibetan Plateau. A TOMB IN THE HIGHLANDS In 2005, a truck rumbled…
After the deadly 2022 Itaewon crowd crush, South Korea faced a failure of prevention—and mourning. A group of anthropologists explores how grief was managed, marginalized, and ultimately erased,…
An anthropologist fighting cancer navigates the social pressure to get breast reconstruction after a mastectomy. ✽ “I’ve decided to go flat.” I said these words aloud for the…
A group of anthropologists working in Indonesia explores how mistrust among on-demand drivers—toward companies and one another—can be a form of individual power. ✽ DEDI WAS HOPEFUL when…
Two ethnographic filmmakers enter the government maze in India, documenting how citizens make claims on the state while imagining alternate bureaucratic encounters. ✽ Enter the Reception Room, and…
As judges scout new restaurants to evaluate in U.S. cities, an anthropologist investigates the elite, Eurocentric history of the Michelin Red Guide and how it became the ultimate…
An anthropologist offers a lens on how losses from war dramatically alter a family—and a society. ✽ BEFORE I FORMALLY BECAME an anthropologist, my mom and I lived…
On December 8th, 2024, Syria – my country of birth and the place where I lived for twenty-four years – […] The post Inheriting a Dislocatory Moment appeared…
Speaking was very risky during the fifty-four years long Asad family domination of the republic.[1] By speaking, I am not […] The post On Volte-Face (Takwi’) appeared first…
Didier Fassin. 2024. Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza. London: Verso. Israel’s nearly two-year […] The post Their Life Has Been Taken;…
On the 7th of December 2024, Damascus was up all night having a special kind of party. At 3 a.m., my siblings […] The post On Silence appeared first on…
A linguistic anthropologist explores the queer Ballroom scene in San Juan—and how performers are incorporating critiques of colonialism into the art form. “READING” ABOUT HER FASHION I look…
After Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win, an anthropologist set out across the U.S. to understand the nation’s deepening divides. In the new book Something Between Us, he…
A lawyer and anthropologist examines the history of the longest road in South Africa and why a proposed extension may repeat past violence. While researching the history of…
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) along the border of North and South Korea is the site of the longest ceasefire in the world. In this region, the effects of…
In two erasure poems, a poet-anthropologist imagines alternative futures using text from the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, through which the British “sold” Kashmir to a despotic Dogra ruler.…
The speaker in this broken sonnet form utters disobedience for structures that extract care in the Anthropocene. “Broken Sonnets for the Anthropocene” is part of the collection Poets…