Society for Cultural Anthropology

Scorched-Earth, Poisoned Water: Settler Violence from Diné Bikéyah to Palestine Settler colonialism has been a useful framework to comparatively analyze violent histories of dispossession across myriad geographies and politic...

Find the post and the rest of the series here:
www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Screen shot of the post title in orange, "Scorched-Earth, Poisoned Water: Settler Violence from Diné Bikéyah to Palestine," and below is the series image, a flag from a Palestine solidarity encampment in Copenhagen, Denmark: a white flag, with three fists in black, white and green emerging from a red tent.

From our Settler Colonialism series University of Chicago anthropology professor Teresa Montoya:
In Diné Bikéyah as well as Palestine, water continues to be a precious resource to be controlled physically such as through built infrastructures or even legally.

📢📢📢 New Editorial Alert 📢📢📢

American Ethnologist editors lift the lid on the ‘black box’ of journal submission...

An Editorial Insight: Title, Abstract & Keywords are not an afterthought! Search engines rely on them and they persuade reviewers and readers to engage with your work.

📢 EASA President Hayal Akarsu speaks with APLA’s Heath Cabot on the global assault on academic freedom — from police on campuses 🚔 to rising precarity 💼

🎙️ Read the full interview via @amethno.bsky.social
🔗 buff.ly/Y8s8qMf

"The Ohio State chapter of the AAUP believes strongly that the principle of academic freedom & free speech must be thoroughly & vigorously defended, not by mouthing a commitment to values, but by principled actions in alliance with our colleagues across affected institutions"

@osuaaup.bsky.social

Columbia University’s agreement with the Trump administration is a disaster for academic freedom, freedom of speech, & the independence of American higher education. Never in the history of our nation has an educational institution so thoroughly bent to the will of an autocrat.

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Unbuilding Confronting the entangled legacies of failed infrastructures, toxic materials, and compromised futures, this series opens up the concept of unbui...

Brand new Theorizing the Contemporary series, "Unbuilding" edited Penny Harvey, Hannah Knox, Maria Şalaru & Constance Smith!
From decommissioned power stations to retrofitted tower blocks & unruly urban ecologies, these essays reveal how acts of unmaking can generate new worlds.

Screen shot of the series title in orange, and below the series image, a flag from a Palestine solidarity encampment in Copenhagen, Denmark: a white flag, with three fists in black, white and green emerging from a red tent.

Don't miss our Theorizing the Contemporary series from July:
"Settler Colonialism: Unsettling Exceptionalisms with & through Israel-Palestine" edited by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui & Ather Zia.
The collection illuminates the common structural dimensions of settler colonial projects across the globe.

Settler Colonialism: Unsettling Exceptionalisms with and through Israel-Palestine This forum focuses on the urgent necessity of understanding settler colonialism as an analytic, especially given the recent political assaults on...

"This forum focuses on the urgent necessity of understanding settler colonialism as an analytic, especially given the recent political assaults on the concept that have been concurrent with the Israel and U.S. genocide of the Palestinian people."
Check out all 14 contributions here:

Screen shot of the series title in orange, and below the series image, a flag from a Palestine solidarity encampment in Copenhagen, Denmark: a white flag, with three fists in black, white and green emerging from a red tent.

Don't miss our Theorizing the Contemporary series from July:
"Settler Colonialism: Unsettling Exceptionalisms with & through Israel-Palestine" edited by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui & Ather Zia.
The collection illuminates the common structural dimensions of settler colonial projects across the globe.

👋 @afleisch-anthro.bsky.social swooping in here on a Tuesday evening for what will probably be my last week on the CulAnth accounts. Changes are coming!
But for now we've got a ton of new content lately so stay tuned! <3

Unbuilding Confronting the entangled legacies of failed infrastructures, toxic materials, and compromised futures, this series opens up the concept of unbui...

Brand new Theorizing the Contemporary series, "Unbuilding" edited Penny Harvey, Hannah Knox, Maria Şalaru & Constance Smith!
From decommissioned power stations to retrofitted tower blocks & unruly urban ecologies, these essays reveal how acts of unmaking can generate new worlds.

I often say that reporting on sex testing in sports is like reporting on a really twisted, 100 year game of wack-a-mole where we see the same things happen over and over. This is a great example. (A short thread, if you'll indulge me.)

Purdue student detained by ICE and taken to troubled Louisiana holding facility Yeonsoo Go, 20, was detained after her immigration hearing in Manhattan and taken away by ICE agents.

Go, a college student, has a dependent visa (her mother, an Episcopal minister, is here on a religious worker visa), which doesn't expire until Dec. But when she tried to renew it early, ICE nabbed her and sent her halfway across the US to a detention center.
www.wthr.com/article/news...

📢📢📢 New Editorial Alert 📢📢📢

American Ethnologist editors lift the lid on the ‘black box’ of journal submission...

An Editorial Insight: Know your Anthro journals! Read the last few issues to get a sense of AE’s style, how theory and ethnography work together to propel the argument.

📣 @amanthro.bsky.social invites pitches for its new Highlights section, featuring creative, experimental, and critical work from early-career anthropologists.

Submit 200-word pitches to Armanc Yildiz: ayildiz@g.harvard.edu
🔗 bit.ly/3QhJKoF

More from my developing Weird PhD Syllabus, on the institutional exercise of giving grades to PhD students:

"Here’s the thing about evaluation in a PhD seminar: I consider you to be my junior colleagues. Outside of PhD seminars, I do not grade my colleagues.

Unbuilding Confronting the entangled legacies of failed infrastructures, toxic materials, and compromised futures, this series opens up the concept of unbui...

Just a few hours away from leaving for holidays (!), we have just published this lexicon on “Unbuilding” in @culanth.bsky.social Theorizing the Contemporary series—which includes a short entry of mine on the concept of “Intransitive”. Check it out!

www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

New article on 'Sustainability' out in the Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology! Written off the back of designing the @soasanthro.bsky.social MA Global Futures and Sustainability curriculum - thank you to our amazing students and all who supported!

Living “Out of the Loop”: Unemployment in the Context ofLong-Term Illness ABSTRACT: This article is part of the special issue “Laboring from Ex- Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work” (title of SI; AWR July2025; 46(1)) edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. This paper examines the experiences of work and unemploymentamong residents of an East London borough living with multiple long-term health conditions. Through ethnographic research,we explore the psychopolitics of unemployment in an urban setting, focusing on the cyclical relationship between (un)employment and (ill-)health. Our findings show the double bind participants often experience regarding work: while they desired employment and could only imagine a fulfilling life through work, they found it impossible to remain in most workplaces they had experienced, as these environments worsened their health conditions. This contradiction created a sense of existential stuckness among our study participants. Additionally, our analysis highlights the moral and bureaucratic challenges involved in managing unemployment. The benefit assessment process, combined with social isolation, often reinforced a chronic identity among long-term unemployed participants, leading to a diminished sense of their own capabilities. By theorizing the seduction of labor in contemporary societies as a distinct form of psychopolitics inherent to neoliberal governance, we aim to highlight the troubling pressure governments place on individuals to work, even under conditions of long-term illness.

In May, the UK govt announced the biggest overhaul to the welfare system in over a decade.

A million people could lose disability benefits under the proposed changes.

Why does it matter? anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

@qmul-wiph.bsky.social @anthropologia.bsky.social

Re-upping this call for awesome folks to join our amazing team of CEs!

If you’re interested in collaborative editorial work, love critical scholarship, and want to be part of a fantastic community, check it out! ✨ #anthro

Logo of the journal Cultural Anthropology with the journal name in large white block letters on a coral-red background.

See the full article here: journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...

"While activist sensibilities are rooted in the notion that stopping violence requires seeing more clearly and that interventions are external to rather than constituent of spectacle, postactivist politics and ethics are relational..."

The author writes, "My aim, then, is to trouble the idea of activism as itself ethical and instead point to a postactivist sensibility predicated on complicity and entanglement."

Saffitz notes: “Violence against people with albinism had been reported on for a decade, and more than a hundred Tanzanians had been killed or permanently disfigured.”

In this recent article on "albinocide" in Tanzania, Jane L. Saffitz defines it as:

“the killing of people with albinism, allegedly to satiate demand in an illicit speculative economy for their body parts.”

Award season continues! Please consider submitting a laler or nominating someone for the Virchow award; deadline is Aug 1! Awards are made in the following categories: 1) Professional, 2) Graduate Student, and 3) Undergraduate Student. More info in the thread:

journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...

“These reactive and micro-political practices forestall the pursuit of macro goals like sustainability or justice, which are the normative objectives of planning in the Global South...”

He shows how reactive regulation "occurs through micro-political encounters with lower-level bureaucratic offices," and that "it has significant consequences for broader configurations of space, time, and social relations in the city."