Doctrinal and Lived Suffering

This article examines the experiences of Thai women living in Finland, addressing a significant gap in research regarding their perspectives on the challenges they face in a new environment, particularly through the lens of Buddhism. In cont…

Kitchen Utensils, Altarpieces and Friendly Smiles

Among the high number of asylum seekers arriving in Europe in 2015, thousands converted from Islam to Christianity. An emerging body of scholarship explores these conversions. This article sheds light on the lived experience of converting to…

Reimagining Public Anthropology

Public anthropology refers to the dissemination of anthropological knowledge beyond the academy, although no clear-cut definition of the term exists. In this article, we scrutinise the history, meanings, and practices of public anthropology…

Knowing Digital Governance from Below

This paper considers the question of what it is to ‘know’ digital governance through an experiential, bottom-up lens, and presents some empirical detail from recent fieldwork with feminist movement actors in northern India – both formally or…

Divining Truth

This article considers predictive AI as a cultural epistemological form akin to divination, which is to say, a future-oriented technology of knowledge that concerns itself with risk and uncertainty. The article explores some of the cultural …

The AI Triple Whammy

The gig economy is a rapidly growing global labour paradigm involving casualised labour across sectors as varied as transportation, freelancing, domestic help, programming and vacation rentals. The gig economy has been studied extensively wi…

A Cause, but no Rebels?

This article analyzes the political activities of residents in a 50-year-old slum in New Delhi. Based on long-term fieldwork undertaken periodically between 2004 and 2019, we describe the forms of oppression experienced by slum residents, ho…

Rebel Attentiveness

Living under Israeli occupation, Palestinians face countless controls over their daily lives and movement. This research focuses on the reflections of cycling group founders and participants in the occupied West Bank, who ride despite effort…

The Troublemaker as a Non-intentional Social Activist

There is a tension in Ricœur’s thinking between the undeniable presence of violence and his trust in a primordial goodness of existence. This tension is linked to Ricœur’s understanding of the human being as ambiguous and fragile, torn betwe…

Occupied Spatiality: Non-Peace in Self-Affirmation

Paul Ricœur considered the theme of non-peace in self-affirmation to have such existential and phenomenological bearing that he devoted his intellectual capacity to explore the self that is never immediately present to oneself or at immediat…

Narrative and Violence in Just Institutions

Beginning with images of rampant destruction and violence in our day, Paul Ricœur’s reflections on the political paradox and his “little ethics” (contained in Oneself as Another) are responses to peace and understanding. Ricœur is concerned …

The Narrative Possiblity of Peace and Understanding

With its emphasis on action and new possibilities opened by imagination, Paul Ricœur’s narrative theory offers insights to understanding each other in a world of polarized views. His theory is helpful in describing the potential that narrati…

Toward an Ontology of Peace II

Following Part I, this essay (Part II) continues my attempt to develop an ontology of peace by drawing resources from Ricœur’s thought. I begin with Augustine, Dionysius, and Aquinas to show that peace is not contrary to our humanity but is …