Everywhere is a Border, Everywhere a Wall
On Stratified Topologies of Urban Passing 1 April 2024, London. Written while shifting from one transient stay to another, sixteen […] The post Everywhere is a Border, Everywhere…
Tag: Precarity
Rooms That Refuse to Remember Us. On the hidden labor of hospitality
Drawing on autoethnographic experience as a hotel cleaner in Amsterdam, this essay examines how the hospitality industry renders its workers structurally invisible. The post Rooms That Refuse to…
Iqra Anugrah and Rachma Lutfiny Putri: A Revolt that never was? On the aftermath of the 2025 Indonesian protests
Political upheavals can feel like riding a roller coaster – exhilarating at the beginning, full of adrenaline rush, until it suddenly stops. This is what happened to the…
Syria in transition: Impressions from Damascus after the toppling of the Assad regime
In late January 2025, just under two months after the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria, I returned to […] The post Syria in transition: Impressions from…
Being Fungible – They Only Want Us from the Neck Down
They Only Want Us from the Neck Down Across the airport car park, a figure in a mad dash—a sprawl […] The post Being Fungible – They Only…
A Woman’s Job: Making Middle Lives in New India
In this excerpt from A Woman’s Job: Making Middle Lives in New India, Asiya Islam examines the lives of educated young women working in precarious jobs in Delhi’s service sector. The…
The violent face of bureaucracy
Whenever I meet Merule, a 42-year-old Nigerian citizen living undocumented in Milan, Italy, I am struck by the number of people he knows. Merule’s social network unfolds throughout…
Anthropology and absurdity: Introduction
Anthropology is often seen as the discipline that makes “the strange familiar and the familiar strange”. Here, however, we are staying with the strange in the form of…
Climate Preconstruction in Coastal Africa
The climate crisis is upon us. Extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves and fires are increasingly wreaking havoc around the globe. Even in the cosseted…
Heresies and provocation. For a politics of urban justice
In search of urban heresies Wherever I glanced around Solomon’s office, I saw, plastered on the walls and spread over the desk, maps, reports, designs of buildings that…
Encountering Precarities: The Podcast
Allegra Editor Ian sits down with Thread guest editors Viola Castellano & Olivia Casagrande to discuss ‘Encountering precarities: ethnography, spurious solidarity and neoliberal academia.…
Unfinished adulthood: discontinuous precarities as epistemic opportunities
This post is part of our Encountering Precarities series. The thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and t…
Whose crisis is this crisis?
This post is part of our Encountering Precarities series. The thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and t…
A striking comparison: on young Senegalese wrestlers and precarious scholars
This post is part of our Encountering Precarities series. The thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and t…
Reflections on how solidarities and shared experiences of dispossession might transform anthropological praxis
I begin this reflection on the potential of solidarities in anthropological praxis with an example drawn from the University College Union (UCU) pension strikes in the U.K. In…
Unsteady grounds: On ethnography, academic precarity, and motherhood
This post is part of our Encountering Precarities series. The thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and t…
Encountering precarities: ethnography, spurious solidarity and neoliberal academia
In the wake of calls for responsibility and for ‘Raising our voice’ (AAA 2020), early-career researchers’ in anthropology risk to bear the weight to redeem the discipline while…
They eat our sweat
In They Eat Our Sweat, Daniel Agbiboa engages the road transport sector in Lagos, Nigeria, to reveal how corruption operates through a dialectical “double capture” of state and…
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…
Careers and Caregiving: An impossible juggling act?
By Kathe Managan This fall, with my AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) card in my wallet, I attended my third new faculty orientation and learned about the…
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 –…
Morumbi and Paraisópolis: A Four-Act Play
Dramatis Personae Heitor: a 13-year-old boy Mr. Gomes, his father: a waste handler, working at a garbage dump Ms. Gomes, his mother: a dry cleaner, working from home…
Call for Reviews: Life at the edges in a changing world
Since the Covid-19 pandemic started more than two years ago, time has been put on hold and precarity has become an even more common feature of life globally.…
On the use and abuse of networks in academia
Like most anthropologists, we have been watching events unfold at Harvard University’s anthropology department over the past weeks: accusations of abuse; letters in support of the man accused…