Rachel Smith

Devastatingly sad.
Every Labour MP should be forced to read this. In fact, every MP, who rushed back to Parliament to vote to save one steel mill, whilst hastening the collapse of dozens of universities - and harming the students, staff, communities and economies universities sustain and support

Header image from @culanth showing ‘Vol. 40 No. 4 (2025) – Articles’ and the article title in large text: ‘Marine Inequality, Borderization, and the Radical Potential of Kinship.’

Fiona McCormack’s essay, “Marine Inequality, Borderization, and the Radical Potential of Kinship,” engages with climate, capitalism, and decolonial critique, examining how marine spaces materialize global inequalities through regimes of extraction, governance, and labor.

Where Have All the Workers Gone? Re-Imagining Labor in the Post-Pandemic World This Hot Spots series zooms in on the images and re-evaluations of work/labor and changing position of workers in the aftermath of the pandemic. ...

Cultural anthropology latest Hot Spots Series, “Where have all the workers gone?” is both "an empirical question that ethnographers often encounter in the field" and "an epistemological reflection on where anthropologists today locate labor, work(ers), and their struggles"

‘Give PhD archive attention it deserves,’ British Library urged Scholars criticise lack of progress on restoring repository of 600,000 PhD theses more than two years after it was felled by cyberattack

I am really disappointed that the new version of EThOS at the British Library (the service for getting PhD theses) will be metadata-only. I really think we should use such resources, even if they are not books. They are still contributions to knowledge.

www.timeshighereducation.com/news/give-ph...

A reminder: as happy as I am to see adverts for jobs; no role is 'permanent' in UK HE and hasn't been for some time. 'Open-ended' is what we call it: it's important to remember we are actually all precarious to some extent, especially at the moment.

NEW: Our investigation for @thenerve_news reveals not only that Peter Thiel’s Palantir is completely enmeshed in our critical national infrastructure.

It’s also the ‘cloud support’ for our nuclear weapons system 🤯
1/

www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-t...

Why are UK universities failing? - LSE Impact The HE sector in the UK faces the prospect of a university going into administration. How have universities fallen so low and is change possible?

👀ICYMI: "To speak of the “demise” of the UK university is not to suggest its disappearance, but its transformation into something increasingly unrecognisable."

#AcademicSky #HigherEducation #Universities

Bordering on Indifference How a largely Latino/a workforce of immigration agents reconciles the moral ambiguities of its work

Irene Vega wrote a new book called Bordering on Indifference that’s an ethnography of ICE and CBP agents!

press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

The nationalist right - our high streets are empty and it's killing communities
The government - let's explore making them more attractive and easy to navigate destinations
The nationalist right - woah, that is akin to the mass murder of millions of people by a totalitarian dictator

On Burns Night 2026, the words of our revolutionary-loving Scots bard are more potent than ever. Here are some of Robert Burn’s works on themes of revolution, solidarity, and universal equality: www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertb...

Newly Digitized Records Reveal How Indigenous People Shared Their Knowledge of New Zealand's Plants With Captain Cook's Crew Long-overlooked documents housed at London's Natural History Museum testify to the exchange of information between 18th-century European botanists and their Indigenous counterparts

Fun read
#TheOutpost 🌱🌿👨‍🌾☠️🦜
Newly Digitized Records Reveal How Indigenous People Shared Their Knowledge of New Zealand's Plants With Captain Cook's Crew www.smithsonianmag.com/history/newl...

There is still time to apply for our panel, co-sponsored with @easainfo.bsky.social Labour Network: P159 "The Work of Resistance: Possibilities for Labour in Polarising Worlds" #EASA2026 in Poznań in July
nomadit.co.uk/conference/e...
CFP closes on Monday (26 January)! @saw-anthroofwork.bsky.social

When you do get in, it looks like something out of 1980s…

A third of a billion spent on ruining people’s lives doesn’t seem a wise use of education spending

How is this 'responsible financial management'? Explain it to us like we're 5. Because that's how staff gets talked at when we point out that cutting your core resource has never led to magic growth anyway.

Change this financial system. Yesterday.

Jesus, hadn't realised it had gotten to over 13,000 jobs (academic and professional services) - any other industry facing this level of job losses would be having crisis meetings with government... (gov took emergency control of British Steel to save 2,700...)

Many university presses - Incl Oxford Cambridge and Liverpool - have not-for-profit status AND run multiple well regarded journals. Consciously prioritising NFP publishers is a small thing, but wholly achievable.

Are you working on the anthropology of labour and work? Then this may be the panel at EASA2026 for you! Submit your abstracts until January 26 2026.

Tag us in your announcements so that we may repost them.

We look forward to seeing you in Poznań
#conference #easaanthro #anthropology #EASA2026

@anthropologyofwork.bsky.social
Editorial Collective invites contributions to P 159 “The work of resistance: possibilities of labour in polarizing worlds” at #EASA2026

CfP closes on 26 Jan 26

See you in Poznan!
#anthropology

@saw-anthroofwork.bsky.social

Work with us We are happy to announce that we are now advertising three (3) paid positions at the Tomb of the Eagles for 2026. The positions are a Heritage Manager who will oversee day-to-day running of the site…

Want a heritage job? In beautiful usually-there’s-not-this-much-snow #Orkney?

As part of our community project to reopen the Neolithic Tomb of the Eagles to visitors, we now have three paid positions advertised for 2026.

For more info follow the link. Applications close 5pm, 18 January.

🏺

Sciences like anthropology are so valuable because they provide refutations to "this is the way it always was, and thus the way it has to be" type assertions. Its very different to the science I do, but perhaps even more valuable.

Douglas Gerrard | Escalation in West Papua The conflict in West Papua may be the world’s most unequal war: raids on military bases have improved the West Papua...

‘The conflict in West Papua may be the world’s most unequal war: raids on military bases have improved the TPNPB’s fighting capacity, but they still often face Indonesian jets and missiles armed only with bows and arrows.’

Douglas Gerrard:

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

It will surprise nobody that the cataloguing system that is slopwashing like this turns out to be Primo.

(If you're not sure what system your university library uses: have you ever searched for a book and been offered three pages of links to reviews instead? That was Primo too.)

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

The editorial collective of @anthropologyofwork.bsky.social and the #Anthropology_of_Labour network invite contributions exploring how different polarisations in the world today are both reconfiguring work and giving rise to new forms of resistance and solidarity #EASA2026
@easainfo.bsky.social

And I had the immense privilege to illustrate the book cover 🍉🍉🍉

Mohammed has received an unconditional offer to study a postgraduate degree in Data Science at University of Aberdeen. Please donate if you can, and share www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/gaza-to-ab...

Point/Counterpoint: No Blood For Oil vs. Exactly How Much Oil Are We Talking About?

The Onion, 23 years ago.

theonion.com/no-blood-for...

Anthropology of Work Review | AAA Labor Studies Journal | Wiley Online Library This article is part of the special issue “Laboring from Ex-Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work”, Anthropology of Work Review 46(1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksc...

Check out @saw-anthroofwork.bsky.social Anthropology of Work Review's most read article of 2025: “Activism Was a Survival Strategy”: Chronic Illness & the Power of Endometriosis Activism as Work @anikakoenig.bsky.social & Caroline Meier zu Biesen anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...