An [un]Heroic Journey
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…
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…
Didier Fassin. 2024. Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza. London: Verso. Israel’s nearly two-year […] The post Their Life Has Been Taken;…
Introduction In the short story Before the Law, Franz Kafka writes about a man from the country who attempts to […] The post At the state’s gate: The…
A.J. Yumi Lee and Karen R. Miller. 2024. Prehistories of the War on Terror: A Critical Genealogy. Philadelphia: University of […] The post Prehistories of the War on…
In photo and video material of violent conflict, a phenomenon regularly occurs that needs interpretation: perpetrators of violence who appear to enjoy their actions, or bystanders laughing or…
This blog post is part of the Seminar Reconceptualizing Warfare and Its Experience, April 10, 2025, funded by the WARFUN project. Commenting on my research for the WarFun project,…
I am currently wrapping up an essay film, Falling, about my fraught relationship with Pepe and his brother, two retired Argentine military officers whom I met during my…
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury. 2024. Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. […] The post Colonizing Palestine: The Zionis…
An anthropologist reckons with how digital media has changed youth gang culture dynamics—and what can be done to combat the spread of deadly rumors. ✽ In 2019, Luis…
A Tanzanian historian and poet conjures alternative engagements with Black African women who were marginalized by violent colonial histories and imprisoned in the archives. As the 2024 poet-in-residen…
An anthropologist reflects on the racist undertones of some U.S. efforts to eradicate the spotted lanternfly, an insect from Asia deemed invasive. ✽ A bright red flash whips…
In two erasure poems, a poet-anthropologist imagines alternative futures using text from the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, through which the British “sold” Kashmir to a despotic Dogra ruler.…