Society for Cultural Anthropology

“I Heart SfAA” is coming & will focus on supporting global mini-conferences that expand access for #SfAA members worldwide.

Save the dates: Feb. 9-13. Together, we're bringing SfAA to the world & the world to SfAA.

More: appliedanthro.org/i-heart-sfaa/

#AppliedAnthropology #IHeartSfAA #SfAAGlobal

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. ...

Read the introduction and 13 contributions exploring labor from around the world, across subfields, and in different contexts here: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Where Have All the Workers Gone? Re-Imagining Labor in the Post-Pandemic World by Jelena Tošić and Agnieszka Pasieka

How did the Covid-19 pandemic lay bare and exacerbate changes in work and labor? Our latest Hot Spots series is a global look at how labor has changed as a social form and object of study.

Sustaining Containability: A Conversation with Elana Resnick In this interview, Elana Resnick reflects on the evolution of her research on recycling and waste in Bulgaria. She highlights the longer historic...

In Elana Resnick's research on race and waste in Bulgaria, "containability is a fantasy of material and social boundedness—that people who collect waste, racialized as nonwhite, can be sequestered out of white purview." www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

You can’t walk for ten minutes in my neighborhood without seeing them: boxy SUVs, mostly domestic-made, with tinted windows and out-of-state plates. Two men riding in front, dressed in tactical gear. Following behind is a train of three or four cars, honking. Sometimes there are bikers, too, blowing on neon-colored plastic whistles that local businesses give out for free. Every street corner has patrollers on foot, yelling and filming when a convoy rolls by. If the ICE vehicles pull over, people flood the street. Crowds materialize seemingly out of nowhere. The honking and whistling amps up, becoming an unignorable wail, and more people stream out of their houses and businesses. When agents leave their cars they’re met with jeers, mostly variations on “Fuck you.” Usually someone starts throwing snowballs. Agents pull out pepper spray guns, threatening protesters who get too close. If there’s enough of a crowd, they use tear gas.

Well before Kristi Noem announced DHS operations in Minnesota, the neighborhood got ready. It started with rapid response preparation in the park’s recreation center and legal observer trainings at a church. Then it was block-by-block meetings. Small networks that formed in 2020 were reactivated to distribute 3D-printed whistles and practice scenarios for confronting agents. When ICE deployed in December, Signal threads for local alerts quickly surpassed the thousand-user limit, and an extensive mutual aid ecosystem of grocery runs and rideshares emerged overnight. After Good’s murder and Noem’s announcement that the number of ICE agents in Minnesota would triple, everyone I know cancelled their social plans. Lots of people called off work. What we’re doing now is this: The trainings have evolved into street medic workshops on protecting yourself from chemical weapons and lessons on digital security; there’s a meet-up to sew reinforced umbrellas as shields from mace and a collection spot for barricade materials. And this is what it’s like: Sometimes you’re chasing ICE off your street, maybe you’re buying groceries for a family, but a lot of the time you’re on your phone. Behind every actionable piece of organizing are hours spent coordinating in Signal threads, calling to check up on someone, scrolling live feeds. At night, over dinner, it’s all anyone can talk about. Did you hear? Did you see that post? Did you read in the thread?

The community warning, defense, and mutual aid we're seeing in Minneapolis is the product of years of responding to state violence. Amazing essay from @nplusonemag.com : www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

ICE is sending these kids to the concentration camp in Dilley, Texas, where they're preparing to have so many children that they're opening a new school there. They're actively hiring teachers now. I reported on it last month. We have to get people out of there.

With Twin Cities Under Siege by ICE, Minnesota Moves Toward a General Strike An economic blackout on January 23 could be the first general strike in Minnesota in nearly 100 years.

Great backgrounder on today's state-wide economic shutdown in Minnesota against ICE violence. “The goal of the Day of Action is to expand the coalition, get more and more people and organizations involved so that we can be more powerful the day after.” truthout.org/articles/wit...

Renee Good's Murder and Other Acts of Terror An interview with Robin D. G. Kelley on how to think about ICE—and the broader history of police violence.

"It is precisely the long experience of organizing against [local police] violence that prepared activists in these cities to resist ICE." Robin D.G. Kelley on the ongoing attack on immigrants and the popular resistance to it, in @bostonreview.bsky.social: www.bostonreview.net/articles/ren...

Reminder, the priority deadline is February 1 for the Call for Editor of Dispatches from Applied Anthropology (Dispatches), a rebooted, public-facing digital magazine of ideas, impact, and #SfAA news.

All info for this new editorial opportunity here:
appliedanthro.org/news/call-fo...

#anthropology

The Damage Wrought: Immigration Before, Under, and After Trump The anthropologists and activists gathered for this series have long been on the front lines fighting for migrant and racial justice. They have a...

Alongside this series on immigration before, during, and after the first Trump presidency: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Im/migration in the Trump Era One year into the Trump presidency, when our core values of multiculturalism, cross-cultural understanding, international diversity, and racial i...

What we're reading and thinking about—this series on immigration in first year of the first Trump era, and how much things have changed or stayed the same: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

On Refusal and Toxic Industrialization: An Interview with Rishabh Raghavan In this interview, Rishabh Raghavan discusses his encounter with everyday life in Ennore, as residents contest authoritative discourse on polluti...

In this interview, anthropologist Rishabh Raghavan reflects on the role of refusal not only in his work theorizing labor and toxicity in southern India, but also in his interactions with his interlocutors - fishermen who refused certain lines of inquiry. www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

The Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Voluntary Death In this episode, we dive into the series of debates that have emerged around assisted suicide, both within and outside the boundaries of medico-l...

How might helping someone die enact care? Our latest AnthroPod episode discusses the ethics, stakes, and care raised by assisted suicide and voluntary death—featuring Miki Chase, Dwai Banerjee, Sophia Jaworski, and Miranda Tuckett: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Sad news today. Fabian’s “Out of Our Minds” was one of the books I read when I was first getting interested in expeditions as an MA student, it definitely helped nudge me on the path I’ve been on for the last 15 years.

Two sociologists in the Guardian today:

Title and cover image of the article, linked in the threaded tweet below: "Fugitive Work: On the Criminal Possibilities of Anthropology" From the Series: From Reciprocity to Relationality: Anthropological Possibilities By Gilberto Rosas

From the archives: "The present and the future demand that we work as insurgents, as fugitives: across real and imagined borders and against pessimisms of the will, but perhaps not the intellect."

So sad to hear! I'm an anthropologist, working on social time and Fabian's writing influenced my work a lot. RIP🖤

www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Title and cover image of the article, linked in the threaded tweet below: "Fugitive Work: On the Criminal Possibilities of Anthropology" From the Series: From Reciprocity to Relationality: Anthropological Possibilities By Gilberto Rosas

From the archives: "The present and the future demand that we work as insurgents, as fugitives: across real and imagined borders and against pessimisms of the will, but perhaps not the intellect."

Abolishing ICE isn’t enough – it’s time to center people’s humanity | Heba Gowayed and Victor Ray It’s far from radical to reject a system predicated on violence – despite what thinktanks might claim

“Abolish ICE” isn’t radical, it doesn’t go far enough.

Latest in @theguardian.com written with my friend @victorerikray.bsky.social.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Two sociologists in the Guardian today:

Opinion | I'm a Minneapolis sociologist who studies violence. Here's how ICE observers are helping. Research into how violence occurs shows that disapproval from the people around you can help reduce it.

For @msnownews.bsky.social, I wrote an article about how ICE Watch is grounded in sociological theories of violence prevention.

The reality is that most men will only commit public violence in extremely specific scenarios and ICE Watch disrupts the conditions necessary for escalation.

News: Anthro community spotted this past week This is just a brief news report that a bit of the old anthro community was spotted online this past week, thanks in part to this post from the folks at Cultural Anthropology (hi Adam): What would …

Documented for posterity here: anthropologia.org/2026/01/17/n...

NSF building on Eisenhower Av. HUD now owns.

Destroying the NSF mural in the foyer. Of the Eisenhower building.

The National Science Foundation sign on our Eisenhower Av building is now gone.

The NSF mural in the foyer is removed and torn off in sheets.

We were supposed to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the agency in May 2025. That never happened.

just a stunning thinker

Fabian’s concept of coevalness is one of the core anthropologic concepts for me and changed my entire methodological approach to research.

Im/migration in the Trump Era One year into the Trump presidency, when our core values of multiculturalism, cross-cultural understanding, international diversity, and racial i...

In 2018, we published the Hot Spots series "Im/migration in the Trump Era."
The series sought to generate discussion between scholars & activists working in the US about the potentials & challenges of practicing engaged anthropology with (im)migrants.

The cover of Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (1983), only teal and black, with mostly horizontal stripes

RIP German anthropologist Johannes Fabian, who passed away last Tuesday. Fabian was most widely known as the author of "Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object" (1983), a then-radical & still-influential critique of anthropological writing, knowledge-making & fieldwork relations. RIP.

Photo from the post of protestors chained together, all wearing white t-shirts, lying down in the road on top of a light snow, with other protestors with signs in the background and a police car and half a dozen police in the street in front of them. 12/10/2013 is stamped in the corner.

Hoping to join anthropology & activism in protest of the U.S. illegalization system, I decided to break the law. On Dec. 10, 2013, 7 activists & I rose early. We chained ourselves together & laid down in the snow outside the Elizabeth Detention Center, a 300-bed facility operated on behalf of ICE.

There’s an intensifying kind of threat to academic freedom – watchful students serving as informants Restricting academic freedom is often thought of in terms of universities telling professors what they can and cannot do or teach. But that isn’t the only scenario.

theconversation.com/theres-an-in...