Category: English

People go missing all over the world, but the reasons for disappearances are enormously diverse. Some people are intentionally disappeared by the state: totalitarian and military governments as well as various paramilitary and criminal organizations ha…

Growing numbers of children are moving between countries because of their parent(s)’ careers. The temporary labour migration of highly educated professionals – sometimes called career expatriates or transnational corporate elites (Amit 2002; Fechter 20…

In this essay, I examine the ‘politics of infrastructure’ by looking at the sociomaterial connections and disconnections, and the implications of wetland infrastructure promises and failures in Central Kalimantan (Anand et al. 2018; Harvey et al. 2017;…

Krause, Franz. Thinking Like a River: An Anthropology of Water and Its Uses Along the Kemi River, Northern Finland. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. 2023. 294 pp. ISBN: 9783837667370 (paperback); 9783839467374 (E-book).

Sustaining lives in urban environments depends on infrastructures – buildings, water pipes, sewers, energy distribution, or roads, among others. Their availability is particularly acute in Africa due to rapid urbanization, entrenched inequalities and p…

Once a large-scale infrastructure such as a railroad, sewage system or power plant is put into place, it not only tends to enjoy a long life, but often also a forceful afterlife. Abandoned railroads may find new uses, while ruined sewage systems or pow…

It was Europe’s wake up call: the news reported that a huge gas pipeline running across the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany had exploded (Oltermann 2022). The explosion caused a release of gas and ruptured the pipeline, abruptly stopping the flow of …

“The Anthropologist’s Toolkit: Reflections on ethnographic methodology” is a new essay series that peers into the anthropologist’s toolkit to reflect on what ethnographic methodology constitutes in all its multimodal forms. We invite all contributions …

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. This article draws insights from access, claim-making and critical environmental justice scholarships to reveal how community-based conservation (CBC) may provide strategic openings for marginalised individuals to claim…

This study examines the enduring presence of traditional birth attendants in Batang Regency, Indonesia, and involves various stakeholders, including users of traditional midwifery services, healthcare professionals, and the general public. The research…

This paper explores motivations behind voluntary activities of youth in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, during an increasingly common period of ‘waithood,’ characterized by prolonged status as youth and delay in adulthood due to challenges with unemployment. …

Post-independent India has witnessed several horrific incidents of communal violence. The largest communal riot happened in the year 1984, in the capital city of New Delhi. But after the occurrence of the Anti-Sikh Riots of 1984, there was silence surr…

This paper adopts Michael Saward’s representative claims theory to analyze Chinese New Zealanders’ participation in non-elected representation. It explores how they made representative claims and examines the democratic legitimacy of their claims. Base…

The present study aims to analyze the relationships between actors from civil society, the State and the private sector, in the dynamics of reconstruction of the territory after the environmental disaster caused by the rupture of the tailings dam of th…

This paper investigated how Japanese young people’s attitudes toward politics and the social environments they are in affect their interaction with political information in their daily life. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty people …

I have long tried to move away from teaching as “passing on knowledge” and moved towards practicing teaching as co-creating knowledge. I have come to regard teaching as a joint act of exploration, also taking into account students’ everyday life experi…

In this paper I argue that transformative fieldwork can and should be a pillar of an undergraduate education in anthropology. By transformative fieldwork, I mean long- or medium-term immersive participant observation that challenges the investigator’s …

This article analyses how identity-based conflicts in Nigeria and national policy solutions to these conflicts affect the goals of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism refers to the idea of an individual defined as a citizen of a single global community. M…

The emergence of Feminist Political Ecological (FPE) position allows to rethink about social institutions like Self Help Groups (SHGs) as foundations for building green movements through everyday practice. The collective voice that has helped them emer…

In May 2023,  the editorial board of Cosmopolitan Civil Societies hosted an online conference on ‘New Conceptualisations of Cosmopolitanism’. Discussions were rich and varied, across two days and several panels. The event was an experiment for the…

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. Zimbabwe’s August 2023 elections were held against the backdrop of outcry over the outcomes of previous elections, which opposition political parties accusedthe ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front par…

Using the theory of reverberations, we track the dissonant transformation of sanitation regimes during the American colonial period in the Philippines, particularly during the cholera epidemic of 1902, to the mis/management of the COVID-19 pandemic in …