Preventing Violence by Keir Irwin-Rogers, Luke Billingham, Alistair Fraser, Fern Gillon, Susan McVie and Tim Newburn examines the UK’s public‑health approach to reducing violence and challenges to imp…
SAPIENS’ 2025 poet-in-residence situates her listening in Kashmir and Germany during and after her fieldwork, contextualizing her contributions to SAPIENS this year. If you missed Uzma Falak’s …
An anthropologist-poet listens to echoes of laughter and other sounds of crossings in Kashmir. In the house once occupied by soldiers laughter echoes as three women sing Yamberzal…
In November 2023, during the first phase of the genocide in Gaza, I published a text in Allegra Lab, asking […] The post Humanitarianism Hijacked: Israel’s instrumentalization of the humanitaria…
Lisa Bhungalia. 2023. Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Israel kills 59 Palestinians in […] The post Reading Elastic Empire: Refashi…
Adam Raz, 2024. Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property. New York: Verso. Adam Raz’s Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property is a […] The post Pillaging Palestine: Policy, Property, and…
SAPIENS poet-in-residence for 2025 listens to a chorus of dreams in her field recordings from Kashmir. ✽ “Dreaming has a share in history.” —Walter Benjamin, Dream Kitsch …
I want to begin not with theory, but with a moment. It is early June 2016, and I am in […] The post Holding Space: On Risk, Rupture,…
Andreas Malm. 2024. The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth. London. New York: Verso Urgency is the word that […] The post The Destruction of Palestine is…
Through her field recordings, SAPIENS poet-in-residence for 2025 listens to murmurings of clay, debris, and time in Kashmir’s Tsaar. ✽ 1 The shared taxi meanders through Tsaar— resting…
As all-out genocidal violence against Palestinians continues in Gaza, an anthropologist calls attention to how the Israeli state operates through quieter, bureaucratic means to displace and dispossess…
A Tanzanian poet unseats the illusionist tale of the mission museum of the Archabbey of St. Ottilien in Germany. ✽ brick and mortar like skin and bone wisps…
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…
Fifty years on, Vietnam is still reckoning with the long-term ecological toll of U.S. warfare—a grim warning as Israel and Russia unleash similar destruction in Gaza and Ukraine.…
I feel surrounded by a special sense of gratitude, one that I’m unsure I have ever felt before, exactly like […] The post Practicing slow scholarship in a…
After more than eight years of no contact, I conducted a video call with a former non-influential officer from an […] The post The Emotional Toll of Death…
This text is a slightly adapted keynote/film introductory note I gave at a conference when the Department of Media and Social Sciences at the University of Stavanger celebrated…
An anthropologist discovers diasporic flights—including her own—that begin at and return to the waters of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. ✽ WITHIN A FEW HOURS…
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…
Sednaya Prison, long cloaked in secrecy and fear, has stood as a stark symbol of the Asad regime’s repression. For […] The post Seeing Sednaya: Echoes of a…
The collapse of Bashar Al-Asad’s authoritarian regime (2000-2024) and the less-violent-than-expected capture of Damascus by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) brought […] The post Beyond Preaching Unit…
On December 8, 2024, I received a flurry of WhatsApp messages from my friend Rawia. At the time, she was […] The post On inheritances and contradictions: Agrarian…
To be honest, I can’t describe my feelings now; it is a historical moment. Syrians finally feel they can breathe, […] The post Recalibrating Hope and Revolutionary Temporality…
“Al-‘ard haafya. La terra è nuda [the land is bare].” Abdu concluded one of our discussions with this sentence in […] The post Return to a Bare Land…