READING BLACK MULTIPLICITIES AND BLACK VISUAL LANGUAGES
How do we read, write, and understand Black visual languages?
The Murky World of ‘Extremism’ Research
Richard McNeil-Willson critiques sensationalised and unethical approaches to researching so-called “extremist” groups, responding to popular accounts that celebrate deception, infiltration, and personal risk.
Gender and danger: the ‘good girl persona’ in institutional fieldwork
This post reflects on contemporary challenges in ethnographic research, foregrounding the everyday ethical, emotional, and institutional pressures that shape fieldwork practice.
The Anthropologist as Tuning Fork
This afterword reflects on the practice of ethnography through the metaphor of the anthropologist as a tuning fork—an embodied instrument attuned to the subtle or violent vibrations of lived experience whilst working through ethnographic materials.
Notes From Unsettling Ground
What do we owe the people who hand us their stories?
Invisible Flight: Privileged Mobility and the Hidden Geography of Displacement
This article examines the flight of Israeli women and children after 7 October 2023 as a form of crisis-driven mobility that remains largely invisible to refugee and migration regimes.
In the grey zone of humanitarian honors: ‘Heroines of solidarity’ in the European ‘refugee crisis’
This article explores the interplay between morality and power in the conferral of humanitarian honors during the European “refugee crisis”.
The Dictator’s New Clothes: Syrian Drama’s Prescience
On the morning of December 8, 2024, just hours after the fall of the Al-Asad regime was officially declared, Syrians
Recalibrating Syria: New Openings for Anthropological Engagement
Joyful crowds toppling statues, unsealing torture prisons, defacing regime iconography, ordinary people roaming freely through Al-Asad’s Presidential Palace . .
Syria in transition: Impressions from Damascus after the toppling of the Assad regime
This post was written in February 2025. In late January 2025, just under two months after the toppling of the