ethnography

The Parasocialists: React Streamers, Video Essayists, Debate Bros, Podcasters, and the Cultural Politics of the Online Left

FORTHCOMING Summer 2026

Good, accessible political commentary has always been hard to come by, but the situation today seems worse than ever. Mainstream media is pure propaganda, alternative media remains resolutely alternative, and the once-wide expanse of social media has been narrowed to a handful of platforms governed by attention-maximizing algorithms that reward no one more than the[…]

a decolonial manual

FORTHCOMING Fall 2025

In Frantz Fanon’s eyes, decolonization “sets out to change the order of the world.” Is that even possible today? If it is in any sense possible in our times, what would this involve: what kind of changes? a decolonial manual is an adventure in thinking through these questions with a hopeful attention on meaningful, enworlded[…]

Burning Diagrams in Anthropology: An Inverse Museum

Imprint:

Published: 11/21/2024

Burning Diagrams in Anthropology examines the use of diagrams in anthropology to reimagine how we think about, and challenge, intellectual histories. Highlighting the impossibility of escaping what different disciplines and institutions deem to be “past,” the author combines critical analysis of selected diagrams with an expansive, exploratory reimmersion in their aesthetic, ethical, and political potential.[…]

Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State

Published: 10/27/2024

When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy? Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together essays, poems, artwork,[…]

Lifetimes: A Theory of Timescales and Life-Forms

FORTHCOMING Summer 2025

At the beginning of the 21st century, many of our most well-known and dependable forms of keeping, managing, and representing time are losing their grasp on the real. Clocks cannot measure how societies speed up, or come to a standstill during crisis, modern historiography is unable to come up with meaningful narratives about mankind as[…]

Urban Liquefaction: Rethinking the Relationship between Land and Sea

FORTHCOMING Spring 2025

From classical times until today, cities have been conceived in the western imagination as ideally confined to the fixities of the land, a space defined in opposition to the fluxes of the sea. Whereas solid land afforded a durable platform for the establishment of property and citizenship, the fluid sea allowed markets—isolated within the secure[…]

Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency

Published: 02/09/2024

Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twenty-seven[…]