News

Maria José de Abreu will give a talk on 'Not a Small Country: Cartographic Imaginations and Maritime Connections in Portugal’s Geopolitical Discourse' at this year's Asia-Africa, New Axis of Knowledge International Conference in Dakar, Senegal on June 11-14, 2025. 

Maria José de Abreu publishes "Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists" in e-flux.  You can read the article here.

Congratulations to Rosalind Morris, whose book, Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa, has been published by Columbia University Press.

Since the deaths of 78 informal miners in the town of Stilfontein, South Africa, Rosalind Morris has been arguing for a new approach to the question of informal mining in Africa, and the need for regional economic repair.

The department is proud to announce that Professor John Pemberton has been awarded a Faculty Recognition Award by the Dean of Social Sciences in honor of his contributions to study in the field.

Jorge Alejandro Rodriguez Solorano's paper “Betting on the State: Indigenous Legal Activism in Mexico’s Reforma Indigena (2024)” has been selected for this year’s Law & Humanities Workshop at Stanford University on June 9-10, 2025. Congratulations Jorge!

In 'Strange Abundance,' Catherine Fennell asks whether deconstruction can unlock resources abandoned in late industrial cities. Read and see the photo-essay here.

What does the landscape of extractivism look like? What is desire in and of the underground? Rosalind Morris reflects on the art and career of one of South Africa's pre-eminent painters, and the queer perspectivalism that he invented to describe his punctured and porous world.  

Following the deaths of 78 informal miners in South Africa, Rosalind Morris published an analytic Op Ed in 'The Conversation' and was interviewed by Richard Poplack for the Daily Maverick. You can read her piece in 'The Conversation' here

PhD candidate, Aamer Ibraheem, has published a photo essay on workers' perspectives on the Golan Heights in the new issue of the flagship journal Current Anthropology. You can read and view his essay, "Elevated: Attuned to White Things," here

Congratulations to PhD candidate, Marini Thorne, who has been awarded a graduate research fellowship from the Center for Political Economy at Columbia World Projects. The grant will underwrite ongoing research on gig work and new forms of labor in contemporary India.

Congratulations to Professor Samantha Maurer Fox, who has won the 2024 Critical Urban Anthropology Association's City & Society Best Paper Prize. The prize was given for Professor Fox's paper, entitled 'A City of Newcomers: Migration and Solidarity in the Former East Germany.'

Congratulations to Elizabeth Povinelli, who has been awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the University of Antwerp/Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, citing her contributions to critical theory, anthropology, decolonization and the arts.

Claudio Lomnitz's recent book, Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico, was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement (by Benjamin T Smith) as well as the Latin American  Review of Books (by Gavin O'Toole) and was the subject of the KPFA radio program "Books and Letters."  

In a contribution to the festschrift for James T Siegel and an anniversary volume devoted to Freud's Group Psychology, Rosalind Morris takes up the question of accusation, in history and in the academy ("Allegories and Algorithms of the Purge: Thinking with James Siegel, Once Again," in Indonesia), and the different itineraries of white melancholia in the US and South Africa ("The Lessons of an Absent Teacher" in Then and Now: On the Crowd, the Subject and the Collective).