Today we continue to celebrate the Allies who handle so much of behind-the-scenes work that is needed to keep fan-bu-tastic (=fabulous meets fantastic) content appearing on our beloved…
Yesterday we highlighted one important development that took place for the Allegra team in March of 2014, namely that we were joined by Ninnu Koskenalho who for the…
Today we have, once again, witnessed the arrival of the World Happiness Reports – reports that claim nothing less than to offer a neatly quantified, ‘objective’ measurement of just…
Over the past few weeks, Allegra has been deeply engaged with a theme that is both topical and urgent: human smuggling. Close observers may have noticed that with…
This Allegra week we focus on a theme that we have addressed numerous times earlier: human rights. This repeated attention is not entirely coincidental as the theme features…
One way of characterizing Amy Levine’s rich ethnographic inquiry into pragmatism is to posit South Korean Civil Movement Organisations as a satisfyingly thorough answer to the question: “how…
Prompted by the invitation to participate in this thematic week on #pragmatisms for Allegra, I would like to share some reflections from my ethnographic reading of a concrete…
In her new book, South Korean Civil Movement Organisations: Hope, Crisis and Pragmatism in Democratic Transition, Amy Levine shows us how a commitment to American pragmatism crosses disciplinary…
The theme of #pragmatisms comes from my fieldwork with a handful of civil movement organisations in Seoul during the mid-2000s. It was a buzzword in South Korea and…
This week we have dedicated an unusual amount to one single publication. This has in part been because of the unabashed claim – from one of Allegra’s founders…
The cozy University of Helsinki Think Corner turned out to be too small for the book launch of Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights, edited by Pamela Slotte…
To the blind believer in human rights, nothing so messy as history is truly necessary. To question, to complicate, to ‘problematize’ has been thought to come at too high…
Where does the history of human rights begin: centuries, even millennia earlier, or a mere few decades ago? What constitutes this history and what can we really learn from…
This Allegra week will be devoted to a theme that we have not previously addressed, namely the history of human rights. Furthermore, this thematic week will be arranged…
A few months ago a fellow anthropologist colleague forwarded me a petition: Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions. The main goal is to voice opposition to the…
“If we fail to defend our cause, then we should change the defenders, not the cause.” (Ghassan Kanafani) Oslo has often been defined as a watershed moment in…
When the Jewish Agency in Tel-Aviv announced the institution of the Provisional Government of Israel on 14 May 1948, the war that followed resulted in the destruction and…
In this short piece, I would like to consider a performative site that is often overlooked: that of the press conference. In particular, I want to think about…
People have been trickling into the top of Trafalgar Square since noon. By five darkness has launched its steady discolouration of the world and there must be over…
Definitions of ‘performance’ abound. Some of the principal reasons for anthropologists’ continued interest in the subject of performance are the reflexive, relational, and embodied dimensions of perfo…
On 8 October 2015, Israeli security forces brutally beat and arrested two students of Birzeit University, a major Palestinian university in the West Bank. In response, Birzeit issued…
It’s no longer all quiet on the western front. In recent years, Europe’s “fight against illegal migration” has alternately been broadcast from the militarised Greek-Turkish border and the…
The bulky and weirdly shaped package I hold in my hands weighs nearly 20 pounds. 20 pounds of memories materialize in a final leaving present that now makes…
Last year Mick Taussig gave a short course to doctoral students at the University of Helsinki on the relation between research and writing. Ethnography, he repeated several times…