On the Grievability of Palestinian Lives
Richard Rorty once remarked that in times of uncertainties and profound transformations, there is a tendency to turn to philosophy […] The post On the Grievability of Palestinian…
Richard Rorty once remarked that in times of uncertainties and profound transformations, there is a tendency to turn to philosophy […] The post On the Grievability of Palestinian…
Why should anthropologists support the motion to suspend collaborations with Israeli academic institutions? And why did a group of EASA […] The post Refusing genocide and academic complicity…
This week when I went back to Stockholm University the encampment was not there anymore. All songs, music, debates, seminars, whispers, shouts, and slogans were replaced by a…
In 1931, an American newspaper competition asked its readers to submit the best use of the word denial in a sentence. The winner was “Denial ain’t (just) a…
In the wake of October 7th, I was asked by a fellow anthropologist if my Syrian friends and interlocutors – who participated in the 2011 revolution and are…
Not long after Tufan Al-Aqsa in October, political ecologist Andreas Malm observed in an interview the peculiar temporality of popular revolt in the Arab world. Remarking on the…
I am walking along a road on the outskirts of Leh town, in the Himalayan region of Ladakh. It is October, just past the turn from summer to…
In Kuching, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, I found a musical roundabout. Large loudspeakers turn this otherwise innocuous infrastructure into an absurdist mashup of techno…
It was a crowded, freezing Monday morning in late January, in the large university hospital in northern Italy where I was leading my fieldwork between 2017 to 2018. A…
When Nadja was evacuated from the bomb shelter in eastern Ukraine, she took her cheese with her. She took the cheese from Luhansk to Kharkiv and almost to…
One scalding hot June day in 2014 in a remote village health post in North Shewa, Ethiopia, I attended an event intended to provide information and advice about…
In January 2020, the Senegalese President Macky Sall announced a nation-wide ‘Cleaning Day’. Together with a ‘Zero waste’ campaign and followed by monthly ‘Cleaning Days’, he invited citizens to…
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 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…
When concepts such as ‘participation’ that emanated from radical movements with the objective of transforming social relations and power structures are introduced and popularised in the public discour…
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…
The Institute of Women’s Studies (IWS) at Birzeit University in Palestine has launched “Women’s Testimonies from Gaza”, a project aiming to amplify the voices of women in Gaza living…
The murdered is carried on the shoulders. In haste, a cadaver shrouded in white is slipped into an indoor mass grave. War’s soundtrack echoes in the background, tearing…
Since the creation of the United Nations, and in line with the civilizing mission’s rhetoric used to justify colonialism, racist arguments about the African continent as halting, obstructing,…
It is sadly nothing new to argue that oppressed and colonised people have been and are subject to epistemic violence – othering, silencing, and selective visibility – in…
Is it for a lack of knowledge? The genocide in Gaza is being livestreamed. Daily, images, videos and voice notes proliferate faster than they can be witnessed or heard…
On November 24th, 2023, a temporary ceasefire paused Israeli bombardment[1] and Hamas-led retaliation in Gaza. The pause was intended to bring humanitarian aid into Gaza, as thousands of…
Rainer Maria Rilke: Words gently end at the edge of the Unsayable… — This morning the weight of generations of violence erupted with the coffee pot in the…
“How can we ever forgive them?” I find myself asking over the past month and a half. I do not raise the possibility of forgiveness to suggest a…