Editorial SJSCA 31/2025
Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology
Category: English
Anthropoesy
What might the transformation in transformative anthropology entail? While several responses might be generated, one element that is generally kept to the background is transformation from within. This “inner enquiry” is not necessarily of…
It Takes More Than One To Hold Complexity
This article discusses the potentials and challenges of psychoanalytically oriented “interpretation workshops”: interpretive, collective spaces that address ethnographic fieldwork’s subconscious, emotional, and experiential aspects. While …
Ascona Charter Response—Towards a Just Academia
This contribution proposes a primary focus on academia as a relational economy that subtends academics as individuals, rather than on relationships running between academics and the outside world—such as research participants. In this rega…
Weaponised Positionality? Coercive Disclosure in the “Publish or Perish” Academy
This paper brings anthropological scholarship on reflexivity and positionality in conversation with debates around issues of self-exploitation in the neoliberal university, to argue that the publication pressures early career anthropologis…
Book Review of Frontiers of Belonging
Book review of: Lems, Annika. 2022. Frontiers of Belonging: The Education of Unaccompanied Refugee Youth. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Rethinking the Role of Payments in Research
Navigating payments in ethnographic research provides insights into social dynamics within ethnographic research contexts. Drawing from research with financially vulnerable queer male sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya, this article explores th…
Opinion Piece for The Ascona Transformation Charter
This opinion piece discusses the relevance of The Ascona Transformation Charter in the Peruvian case.
The Symbolic Violence of the Unspoken
This paper explores the silence of my traumatic experience, the feeling of vulnerability, and insecurity that affected my fieldwork and the writing process. Drawing on the concept of “auto-reflexivity”, I address the “double violence”, exp…
ACTRACT. The Ascona Transformation Charter
In this 21st century, the enormous scale and extent of social inequalities and ecological devastation prompt us to revisit the relevance and positionality of anthropology as a discipline and a societal project. how then to address systemic…
Testimonies of Violence during Ethnographic Research
This article looks at how anthropologists deal with the effects of witnessing violence. Although anthropologists work in interaction with human beings, they rarely discuss the consequences of these encounters on their mental equilibrium. H…
Reaffirming the Role of Anthropology in Transformative Change
This brief response to reviews of the Ascona Charter asks how it resonates with and connects diverse realities, concerns, and experiences of transformation. The Charter responds to a collective call from students and engaged scholars for a…
Unveiling Vulnerability
This article explores the process of “unveiling” researcher positionality during fieldwork in Swiss psychiatric spaces and in academia, whilst the researcher herself has a personal connection to the topic as a family member of someone wit…
Foreword
This foreword discusses the ongoing tradition of self-reflection and critique within anthropology, focusing on its impact on PhD students. It highlights how contemporary debates about representation, cultural performance, and decolonizatio…
Ethnographic Intimacy
In recent decades, anthropologists have increasingly recognised the researcher’s vulnerability as an inherent and indispensable element of ethnographic field research. This article shares my ethnographic fieldwork experiences navigating th…
Social history of industry, between environmental violence and working-class ecology. A case study on the chemical plant in Spinetta Marengo, Italy
The Spinetta Marengo chemical plant, located in the city of Alessandria, Piedmont, is one of the most important industrial facilities still operating in northern Italy. Now almost 120 years old, it is the only perfluorinated compounds (PFAS) factory in…
Morocco–French Relations and Foreign Policy in Africa: Postcolonial Legacy and Disruptions
Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. France and Morocco have long maintained close relations. These relations have historically led them to be stable allies in defending their respective interests in Africa. However, this relationship has undergone profoun…
How a Failed Coup D’Etat Can Shape the Trajectory of a State: The Events and Consequences of 6 April 1984 in Cameroon
Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. This article addresses the failed coup d’Etat of 6 April 1984, in Cameroon, asking what it can teach us about Cameroon’s post-1984 political path. The article makes two main contributions. First, it offers evidence that…
Review of Matthew Archer. 2024. Unsustainable: Measurement, reporting, and the limits of corporate sustainability
Anthropology: An Entrepreneurial Discipline
In this essay, I take stock of the existing entanglements and possible future symbiosis between anthropology and entrepreneurship, both as a field of research and as a practice of venture creation. While anthropologists have studied entrepreneurship as…
Business Anthropology: Always In-The-Making
Journal of Business Anthropology
School Grades and Neighbourhoods – A Natural Experiment
Adolescents with an immigrant background have poorer educational performance than their native counterparts, which may partly be explained by the quality of their neighbourhood area upon immigration to Sweden. An important part of neighbourh…
‘More Than Sufferers’: Digital Boundary‑Making and Belonging Through Work Among Ukrainian Forced Migrants in Finland
Following Russia’s initiation of full‑scale war against Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian forced migrants in the EU, including Finland, were granted immediate access to the labor market under the Temporary Protection mechanism. This paper exa…
Framing the Future of Climate Migration in Finnish and Dutch News Media: Understanding Future Visions by Investigating Underlying Normative Judgement
In this article, we analyse the kinds of futures envisioned by Finnish and Dutch news media in relation to climate migration. We find four frames that are used to present the future: a catastrophe frame, a migrant‑positioning frame, an injus…
Review of Anitra Nelson with editorial adviser Vincent Liegey. 2025. Routledge Handbook of Degrowth.
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