Thematic Threads

Anthropologists typically study social order and sense-making. In this thematic thread we instead examine encounters with absurdity: how people experience and label events that are out of joint or beyond explanation. People invoke 'absurdity' when normative expectations break down or when reality becomes incomprehensible. To play with absurdity may also provide a way to critique power.

This open-ended thread features texts and analyses on the current war in Palestine written by scholars of the Middle East, Middle Eastern as well as decolonial scholars whose voices have been silenced by the the increasingly right-leaning structures of power that govern public spaces and our universities in the Global North. Curated by Allegra Lab.

A thread in which theorising and thinking is undertaken by bodies that are more receptive, more sentient, more response-able.

This thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and their interlocutors in and beyond the field.

This thematic thread parses the qualities of trust and their modes of production, asking how material objects, bureaucratic and regulatory practices, as well as diverse kinds of technologies work to configure and condition trust.

This webinar series explores the relationship between mobility and humanitarianism.

Focusing on absences, affective dissonances and silent consensuses, this thematic thread emerged out of four overlapping questions about heritage: Under what circumstances does waste become heritage, and heritage becomes waste? How does the intimate relationship between spirits and energies operate in relation to the abstract public that heritage presupposes? Can spirits, rituals, energies be imagined as heritage?

While failure and dysfunction are most obvious when occurring on a large scale, they also mark mundane interactions and intimate encounters. Failure not only practically inhibits the use of technology, infrastructures or facilities, or reveals a lack of skill, care, or forethought, but it also becomes a diagnostic moment that allows people to make narrative sense of their conditions, and possibly even derive an impetus for future-making. When things do not hold, we can inquire into particular ways of knowing and story-telling. The ethnographic analyses in this thread show that failure can be more complexly tied to success than is often assumed.

From an accelerated push to online teaching, to the further casualisation of academic and support staff, to the renewed pressure on seemingly ‘useless’ disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, it would appear that in the current moment of pandemic, the university as we know it is yet again under threat. For academics this is a moment of reflection — but not only: rather than helplessly bemoaning the ills of neoliberalism, what are concrete steps we can take to resist this erosion and rethink the role of universities (especially in the social sciences) in the formation of real intellectual communities and for society at large?

Afterlives seeks to submit to scrutiny a concept that more often than not remains an under-explored metaphor. What forms of temporal experience, the thread asks, does the notion of afterlife allow capturing? How can it push us to rethink the boundaries of vitality? And, not least, what might the contemporary proliferation of afterlives tell us about our anxieties concerning life and its ambiguous endings in the 21st century? Curated by Marlene Schäfers.

This open-ended thread features blog posts by anthropologists who strive (and likely struggle) to be voices of prudence while we have to pursue an anthropology “from home”, marked by reflexion, caution, wariness – prudence, in a word, as depicted in the 1658 woodcut of Prudentia that accompanies this series.

This thread, curated by the Roadsides editorial collective, serves as showcase for the Roadsides Open Acess e-journal’s approach to the work that infrastructure does culturally, politically, and socially, as well as the labour that goes into the making of infrastructure itself.

The Fluid Mosaic wants to experiment with dialogism (Todorov 1981) between academic subjects and artistic practices and methodologies. The Fluid mosaic is not just an object of research. It allowed all of us to metaphorically swim, dive and float on the fluidity of shared creative discourse that became like a meta-discourse among diversities.

Curated by Till Mostowlansky, this thematic thread facilitates conversation between anthropologists and historians working on a range of Muslim settings who explore the very possibility of Muslim humanitarianism, from theoretical and methodological perspectives.

In this week’s thematic thread we reflect on the dynamic lives of Bitcoin aficionados and their burning desire to 'decentralize' power in contemporary societies through the widespread adoption of digital money. Curated by Matan Shapiro.

This thematic thread explores the topics of statelessness, displacement and disappearance in terms of who can claim justice on whose behalf and the various ways in which uncertainty and accountability are being processed. Curated by Judith Beyer.

This thematic thread draws attention to the secret, hidden, and alternate lives of objects. Curated by Minke Nouwens.

This thematic week on Allegra takes off from the exploration of an ethnographic video game, The Long Day of Young Peng. This interactive teaching tool is a product of field research and interdisciplinary cooperation, and continues to create new linkages and insights through its use in the classroom and its reflections of broader trends in Chinese society. The choices afforded by the game platform confront the players with ethical dilemmas and the workings of their own imagination as they guide young Peng on his way from the countryside to the big city in search of work. Contributors to this thematic week will explore how the Peng game has inspired them to think critically about interactivity, play and representation as constitutive elements of contemporary digital cultures. Curated by Andrea Pia.

This thematic week aims to contribute to the anthropology of humanitarianism, by focusing on vernacular humanitarianisms – local, grassroots forms of helping others that are less visible and less dominant than the international ones. Curated by Čarna Brković.

In this thread we ask who benefits (and who doesn’t) from particular ways of framing ‘sustainability’ and ‘green’ in diverse socio-ecological settings. Curated by Nina Moeller.

This thematic thread celebrates Anthropology Professor Jane Cowan’s appointment as Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professor at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies for 2018-19. Curated by Allegra. Featured image by Mika Federley.

This thematic thread examines recent scholarship on the history of human rights. Curated by Miia Halme-Tuomisaari and Pamela Slotte.

This thematic thread examines some of the events that took place in Ukraine in 2014 and 2015. Curated by Allegra.

This thematic thread addresses issues of systemic injustice within the academia epitomized by the accronym of #HAUtalk. Curated by Allegra.

This thematic thread examines our age as one of 'the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration'. Curated by Luigi Achille.

This thematic thread examines violence and suffering as these are experienced on the margins and peripheries of the late modern world. Curated by Allegra.

This thematic thread examines new ethnographic strategies for accessing the constitutive fabrics of the state and international relations. Curated by Josh Clark.

This thematic thread is dedicated to displacement and new sociabilities. Curated by Heike Drotbohm and Annika Lems.

This thematic thread focusses on Brexit. Curated by Sarah Green.

This thematic thread brings together leading experts and anthropologists of Afghanistan, to reflect on the 2014 Afghan presidential elections and their consequences for the future of the country. Curated by Julie Billaud.

This thematic thread discusses Kurdistan and the Kurdish diaspora. Curated by Allegra.

This thematic thread is dedicated to Postsocialism. Curated by Daria Gritsenko.

This thematic thread addresses the concept of crisis in its socio-historical context, exploring how crisis is discussed, constructed and theorized. Curated by Dimitra Kofti.

This thematic thread offers to explores notions of performance by providing a view into practices of rehearsing, probing, improvising, scores, scripts, choreographies, backstage, frontstage, emergences, entries and exits, frames and scenes. Curated by Jonas Tinius.

This thematic thread examines the historical, ideological, discursive, bodily, ethical, gendered, generational, and institutional dimensions of pragmatism. Curated by Amy Levine.

This thematic thread examines fictions as expert narratives and canonised schemes of appraisal which allow social actors to perceive new connections and select specific patterns of relations, actions and their relative distribution of rights and obligations as metaphorical infrastructures. Curated by Andrea Pia.

Allegra Virtual Museum of Obscure Fieldwork Artefacts.

This thematic thread utilizes the conception of 'ethnographic slam' to explore creativity, imagination and fun as tools to expand rather than limit the possibilities of the written word. Curated by Tanja Ahlin, Eileen Moyer and Silke Hoppe.

This thematic thread proposes anthropological, reflexive accounts of the production of evidence beyond the disciplinary confines of anthropology. Curated by Agathe Mora.

This thematic thread offers different anthropological takes on the ‘return of remoteness’ on a global scale. Curated by Ruben Andersson and Martin Saxer.

This thematic thread focuses on the theme of ‘sustainability’ via the realization that such words like ‘recovery’ and ‘well-being’ offer few solutions when the world is viewed via the lens of crisis. Curated by Fiona Murphy.

This thematic thread explores how the notion of loss illuminates the politics of mobility and global crisis-scapes of austerity, borders, climate change and conflict. Curated by Fiona Murphy and Evi Chatzipanagiotidou.

MUHUM investigates the complex relationship between charity, philanthropy, humanitarianism, development and Islam. Taking the perspectives of anthropology and history MUHUM focusses on how Muslim institutions, networks and individuals negotiate these concepts and how they thereby foster manifold social, spatial and material transformations.

This thematic thread, curated by Vita Peacock, is dedicated to ethnographies of academia and is intended as a critical inquiry into how academics are variously processing their workplaces now. Curated by Vita Peacock.

Date: 5-6 April 2016
Venue: Migration Policy Centre, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI (Villa la Fonte) The workshop is co-organised by the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, and the National Security Studies Institute, University of Texas in El Paso.

This thematic thread explores recent anthropological engagements with ageing in India, South Africa, Japan and the Netherlands. Curated by Jason Danely.

Date: 19-20 May 2016
Venue: Migration Policy Centre, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI (Villa la Fonte) This workshop is entirely sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

This thematic thread is composed of a series of posts written collectively after a workshop entitled “In the moment and after the fact: Ethnographic reflections on political engagement” which took place at the LSE in February 2021.

UNESCO frictions explores cultural heritage policies in the era of global governance, focusing on their most recent and debated domain, that of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), and on its controversial key development, namely, the “participation” of “communities” in heritage identification and selection.

An often underestimated but critical element of academic endeavour is communication. As part of a course on “Cities, Conflict, and Development” that I teach at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, in Geneva, Switzerland, I set my students an assignment that is aimed at pushing them to think about how to best communicate a message. Inspired in particular by the anthropologist Margery Wolf’s famous book, A Thrice-Told Tale, where she presents and analyses the differences between a short story, fieldnotes, and a social science article that she has written about the same events that took place during her research in Taiwan, I ask students to choose an article from the course syllabus, and to re-write it as a 1,500-word short story or poem, along with a 500 words appendix explaining how and why they went about writing their short story or poem. This thematic thread showcases a selection of their very original and evocative work. Curated by Dennis Rodgers.

We seek and provide accessible, critical analyses of today’s global trends toward “totalitarianism”. Though it may seem obsolete, we have chosen the term carefully to both define and combat systemic efforts in countries around the world to reduce plurality and to demand conformity among their inhabitants. Some may argue that use of the term “totalitarianism” signifies a contemporary overreaction in light of the mid-twentieth century horrors – Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, or Mao’s China – that called the term into existence. However, if the argument against this term is that such horrors have not yet begun in earnest, then that itself is sufficient evidence that enough has already gone wrong in global politics.

This series of online talks features presentations that examine the current state of legal anthropology. These webinars are dedicated to Sally Engle Merry, Professor of Anthropology at New York University, President of the Law and Society Association, the American Ethnological Society, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. Sally passed away on 8th September 2020. Her pioneering work on culture and rights, gender violence, and indicators has been highly influential on the subdiscipline and beyond. In memory of her generosity as a teacher and colleague, and in line with her innovative spirit and gentle soul, the seminars are an opportunity for young and more established scholars to engage in vigorous conversations on legal matters of critical relevance to contemporary societal debates. Co-organised by Allegra Lab and EASA LawNet.

Welcome to #MDGcomics: Mzungus in Development and Governments! A Phd turned Graphic novel about Mzungus in Development and Governments.

Meet Omar, the one with the fake beard. Omar is a post-doctoral researcher and author of MDGcomics. He is an anthropologist from the Democratic Republic of Straight Lines, studying the culture and customs of Mzungus in the International Development and Humanitarian sector.