Waiting for ghosts
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…
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…
Like many of my friends and colleagues, I have been relying on the social media accounts of Gazan journalists, photographers, and others (some so young they could be…
‘Is it ethical to write something ‘interesting’ about a massacre as the massacre is unfolding?’ I keep asking myself. ‘Is this not a form of exploiting the dead…
An edited talk delivered at the London School of Economics and Social Sciences on Nov 7th 2023 I spend a great deal of time researching and teaching about…
On the 31st of October 2023, professors and participants in the Master of Advanced Studies in Humanitarian Action at the Geneva Centre of Humanitarian Studies – humanitarian professionals most of…
As if he was, for the occasion of Halloween, joyfully embracing the figure of the grotesque, Hubert Aiwanger, former as well as designated minister of the economy in…
That humanitarian language, materials, and practice offer a space for politics to hide (Feldman, 2018, p. 131) can probably not be more clearly illustrated than through the fact…